Probably the best answer [he writes] to those who talk of Darwinism
meaning the reign of "Chance," is to ask them what they themselves
understand by "Chance." Do they believe that anything in this
universe happens without reason or without a cause? Do they really
conceive that any event has no cause, and could not have been
predicted by any one who had a sufficient insight into the order of
Nature? If they do, it is they who are the inheritors of antique
superstition and ignorance, and whose minds have never been
illumined by a ray of scientific thought.
As an object lesson for his enlightenment, the Professor bids one of
these benighted folk betake himself to the sea-shore on which a heavy
storm is breaking; and having painted a rather elaborate word-picture of
the scene, he thus continues:
Surely here, if anywhere, he [the unenlightened one] will say that
chance is supreme, and bend the knee as one who has entered the
very penetralia of his divinity. But the man of science knows that
here as everywhere, perfect order is manifested; that there is not
a curve of the waves, not a note in the howling chorus, not a
rainbow-glint on a bubble, which is other than a necessary
consequence of the ascertained laws of nature; and that with a
sufficient knowledge of the conditions, competent
physico-mathematical skill could account for, and indeed predict,
every one of these "chance" events.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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