“Lord Kelvin speaks of a ‘fortuitous concourse of atoms,’ but I must confess that I am quite unable to apprehend what he means by that phrase in the connection in which he uses it. It seems to me impossible that by ‘fortuitous’ he can mean something which is not determined by natural cause and therefore is not part of the order of nature. When an ordinary man speaks of a concourse having arisen ‘by chance’ or ‘fortuitously,’ he means merely that the determining conditions which have led by natural causation to its occurrence were not known to him beforehand; he does not mean to assert that it has arisen without the operation of such determining conditions; and I am quite unable to understand how it can be maintained that ‘the concourse of atoms’ forming a crystal, or even a lump of mud, is in any philosophic sense more correctly described as ‘fortuitous’ than is the concourse of atoms which has given rise to a sprig of moss or an animal. It would be a matter of real interest to many of your readers if Lord Kelvin would explain more precisely what he means by the distinction which he has, somewhat dogmatically, laid down between the formation of a crystal as ‘fortuitous’ and the formation of an organism as due to ‘creative and directive purpose.’ “I am not misrepresenting what Lord Kelvin has said on this subject when I say that he seems to have formed the conception of a creator who, first of all, without care or foresight, has produced what we call ‘matter,’ with its necessary properties, and allowed it to aggregate and crystallise as a painter might allow his pigments to run and intermingle on his palette; and then, as a second effort, has brought some of these elements together with ‘creative and directive purpose,’ mixing them, as it were, with ‘a vital principle’ so as to form living things, just as the painter might pick out certain colours from his confused palette and paint a picture. “This conception of the intermittent action of creative power and purpose does not, I confess, commend itself to me. That, however, is not so surprising as that it should be thought that this curious conception of the action of creative power is of value to religion. Whether the intermittent theory is a true or an erroneous conception seems to me to have nothing to do with ‘religion’ in the large sense of that word so often misused. It seems to me to be a kind of mythology, and I should have thought could be of no special assistance to teachers of Christianity. Such theories of divided creative operations are traceable historically to polytheism.