“Thus we have been led along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which Science must stop--not that Science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But in tracing back the history of matter, Science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and, on the other, that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural. “Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limits of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent, it must have been created. “It is only when we contemplate, not matter in itself, but the form in which it actually exists, that our mind finds something on which it can lay hold. “That matter, as such, should have certain fundamental properties, that it should exist in space and be capable of motion, that its motion should be persistent, and so on, are truths which may, for anything we know, be of the kind which metaphysicians call necessary. We may use our knowledge of such truths for purposes of deduction, but we have no data for speculating as to their origin. “But that there should be exactly so much matter and no more in every molecule of hydrogen is a fact of a very different order. We have here a particular distribution of matter--a _collocation_, to use the expression of Dr. Chalmers, of things which we have no difficulty in imagining to have been arranged otherwise.