Because of the supreme power of Clerk Maxwell's mind to seek out the very heart of difficulties, the conclusions which he reached with regard to the existence of matter and the causes for the ultimate qualities which it exhibits, have an enduring interest. Mathematics is sometimes said to lead minds into scepticism. Cardinal Newman even thought that the mathematical cast of mind was the farthest removed from that which might be expected to accept things confidently on faith. Clerk Maxwell's intellect was eminently mathematical; yet, far from sending him over into the camp of the agnostics, his tendency to get at the ultimate reasons for things seemed almost to push him to conclusions with regard to the origin of matter, and especially its ultimate constituents, not ordinarily supposed to be scientific. A passage like the following, for instance, which may be found in his book on "The Theory of Heat," London, 1872, page 312, brings out this tendency very well: "But if we suppose the molecules to be made at all, or if we suppose them to consist of something previously made, why should we expect any irregularity to exist among them? If they are, as we believe, the only material things which still remain in the precise condition in which they first began to exist, why should we not rather look for some indication of that spirit of order, our scientific confidence in which is never shaken by the difficulty which we experience in tracing it in the complex arrangements of visible things, and of which our moral estimation is shown in all our attempts to think and speak the truth, and to ascertain the exact principles of distributive justice?" The argument from design for creation is often said in our day to have lost its weight. For Clerk Maxwell, however, this was evidently not the case. On the contrary, he seemed to find in the detailed knowledge of the ultimate constituents of matter which had come in recent years, additional proofs of the great design which permeates nature. He had come to the conclusion that not only were the groups of atoms which make up living things so ordered as to produce definite results, because there was a great purpose and, above all, a great Designer behind nature, but he also reached the position that the separate atoms of matter were so ordered with regard to one another, and in that ordering were so closely related to corresponding qualities in higher beings, that only the presence of a great design in nature could possibly account for all these wonderful attributes, which were to be found even in the smallest portions of matter. He said in his article on the atom, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: