Surely an outside influence must be caused? If it involved no more energy than is wielded by a may-fly’s wing, how came it there? It is as easy to admit the _self-origination_ of a divinity of power, as the _self-creation_ of power to lift a grain. It is not in the philosophy; ‘outside influence’ has no credentials, and the admission of inability to evolve the universe without it, is an admission that the mechanical philosophy fails at the outset. Nor can it serve the emergency to invoke ‘force.’ A Divine origin of the universe is usually rejected, because the Divinity eludes the methods of science. But we cannot supplant the Deity by enthroning force. Science can tell us what force _does_, but it can no more find what force _is_, than what an infinite mind is. Force is an irresistible mental inference from matter in motion, but its ultimate nature is defiantly beyond the reach of science. It appears, then, that to obtain even the ‘elements’ of our modern chemistry, the philosophy of mechanical evolution must, at the beginning, call in uncovenanted aid. Let us remember this, while for the purposes of argument we allow it. There may have been secured, added, and perhaps altered, motion by the surreptitious ‘outside influence;’ but it can be nothing more. The atoms are still without property, and are only affected by motion. Have we any _experience_ to induce us to believe that atoms without property, even affected by thermal vibrations and pushed by gravity, will build themselves up into the seventy ‘elements’ of chemistry with their specific and inalienable qualities? That, through vibrations of heat and pushings of gravity, they could become hydrogen and mercury, carbon and gold, chlorine and phosphorus! And these properties being thus acquired, by their sheer interactions that all the chemistry, the physics, and the _order_ of all the area of space within the galaxy arose? This is what the formula of the most brilliant philosophy of any age would lead us to infer. In this relation I do not forget the recent and splendid service done by Mr. Crooks to the philosophical side of chemistry in the record of his researches on ‘The Genesis of the Elements.’ It is a most subtile and exquisite means of endeavouring to deduce the _method_, the ‘_law_’ according to which what we know as the ‘chemical elements’ were built up. He obtains indications of a primitive element—a something out of which the elements were evolved. He calls it _protyle_ or first stuff, and from its presence he concludes that the elements, as we know them, ‘are not simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance, or been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but have been evolved from simpler matter—or perhaps indeed from one sole kind of matter.’[14] [Footnote 14: Reprint of a Lecture at the Royal Institution by Mr. Crooks, p. 2.]