Although, if you found your opponent at dice invariably throwing double-sixes, you might feel confident that his dice were loaded, your confidence, unless otherwise corroborated, would not amount to entire certainty. With unloaded dice there would be nothing strange in double-six being thrown once; but, if once, why not twice running? and if twice, why not three, four, or a million times running, provided that the thrower's strength held out so long? No one of the separate throws, from the first to the millionth, would be attended with more difficulty than any other. Whoever made the first might with no greater effort make any one, and therefore every one, of the rest. In the fact of his having commenced the series there would be proof of the possibility of his completing it. In like manner, if it be not inconceivable that Nature's forces may once, by a single unpremeditated exertion, have bestowed on the universe its actual constitution, it is not inconceivable that by continual repetition of similarly unpremeditated exertions, they may have ever since maintained that constitution. In this supposition there is nothing patently absurd. It is perfectly legitimate to suppose that any event or combination of events, not demonstrably impossible, may have occurred in the absence of complete certainty that they have not occurred. It may not be illegitimate, therefore, to suppose that all phenomena of the description termed physical, and all repeated sequences of such phenomena, may have occurred, not causally, but casually--that it may have been a fortuitous concourse of atoms which originally established the existing economy of the universe, and an uninterrupted succession of similar fortuitous concourses that has ever since maintained that economy. That supposition, I repeat, involves no absolute absurdity. What however is, if not absurd, at any rate egregiously unscientific and most unphilosophically credulous, is to treat the supposition as a certainty, notwithstanding that the chances against its representing real facts are as infinity to infinitesimality; for not less is the preponderance of improbability that the laws of nature were not intentionally prescribed, and that the wondrously complex and wondrously useful harmony that has been established between organic structure and natural law was not designedly established. In considering this point, it will be convenient to take law first.