In the first place the "purposefulness" of the movements of the planets is not affected in the very least by the question of heliocentricism. What the author is probably thinking of is an exaggerated and obsolete teleology, but that is not what seems to be the purport of the passage. Let that pass. The main confusion lies in the application of the term "Law." The Ten Commandments, and our familiar friend D.O.R.A., are laws we must obey or take the consequences of our disobedience. The "laws" which the writer is dealing with are not anything of this kind. Newton's Law is not a thing made by Newton, but an orderly system of events which was in existence long before Newton's time, but was first demonstrated by him. It tells us how a certain part of the system works--when we are "_inside it_." It does not in the least explain the system any more than the discovery of the resiliency of the spring of the watch explains the watch itself. So far from dispensing with "the activities of a guiding power," Newton's law is positively clamant for a final explanation, since it does not tell us, nor does it pretend to tell us, how the "law" came into existence, still less how the planets came to be there, or how they happen to be in a state of motion at all. Writers of this kind never seem to have grasped the significance of such simple matters as the different kinds of causes, or to be aware that a formal cause is not an efficient cause, and that neither of them is a final cause. Coming to the latter part of the paragraph, it is in no way proved that instincts can be reduced to physico-chemical laws, and, suppose it were proved, the assumption of design would be exactly where it is at this moment. It is the old story of St. Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna and their discussion on abiogenesis, and surely biologists might be expected to have heard of that. The same confusion of thought is to be met with elsewhere in this book, and in other similar books, and a few instances may now be examined.