For instance, to return to that much debated question about the arrangement of the stars, there can hardly be any doubt that what Mitchell,--who started the discussion,--had in view was the decision between Chance and Design. He says (_Trans. Roy. Soc._ 1767) "The argument I intend to make use of... is of that kind which infers either design or some general law from a general analogy and from the greatness of the odds against things having been in the present situation if it was not owing to some such cause." And he concludes that had the stars "been scattered by mere chance as it might happen" there would be "odds of near 500,000 to 1 that no six stars out of that number [1500], scattered at random in the whole heavens, would be within so small a distance from each other as the Pleiades are." Under any such interpretation the controversy seems to me to be idle. I do not for a moment dispute that there is some force in the ordinary teleological argument which seeks to trace signs of goodness and wisdom in the general tendency of things. But what do we possibly understand about the nature of creation, or the designs of the Creator, which should enable us to decide about the likelihood of his putting the stars in one shape rather than in another, or which should allow any significance to "mere chance" as contrasted with his supposed all-pervading agency? 22. Reduced to intelligible terms the two following questions seem to me to emerge from the controversy:-- (I.) The stars being distributed through space, some of them would of course be nearly in a straight line behind others when looked at from our planet. Supposing that they were tolerably uniformly distributed, we could calculate about how many of them would thus be seen in apparent close proximity to one another. The question is then put, Are there more of them near to each other, two and two, than such calculation would account for? The answer is that there are many more. So far as I can see the only direct inference that can be drawn from this is that they are _not_ uniformly distributed, but have a tendency to go in pairs. This, however, is a perfectly sound and reasonable application of the theory. Any further conclusions, such as that these pairs of stars will form systems, as it were, to themselves, revolving about one another, and for all practical purposes unaffected by the rest of the sidereal system, are of course derived from astronomical considerations.[10] Probability confines itself to the simple answer that the distribution is not uniform; it cannot pretend to say whether, and by what physical process, these binary systems of stars have been 'caused'.[11]