If we suppose an apple-tree to have once grown somehow, and to have somehow got power to produce seeds, that would not produce any more apple-trees, unless the seeds, and all the adjacent atoms that are wanted, had the power and the will to combine and grow into another apple-tree. The first hen that laid an egg performed a wonderful feat enough, but it would have done no good unless the atoms of the egg also knew and resolved what to do to turn themselves into a chicken. Yet spontaneous evolutionists are in the habit of slurring over generation as a thing too "natural," and therefore too easy and simple to require explanation. The continual operation of a law such as this, certainly does not remove mysteries, nor make it more easy to understand how the order and the marvels of the universe can rationally be attributed to Chance rather than to Design, according to "this new philosophy of effects without causes and laws without a lawgiver."[162] For "fortuitous" means, as Professor Case has well observed,[163] not the accidental, as opposed to the regular laws of nature, but the spontaneous necessity of nature, as opposed to the voluntary designs of intelligence. Nor is it only in the organic world that we find the need of such a factor to explain phenomena; for it is throughout more essential than any other force to account for Nature as we find her--in such a manner as to satisfy the logical demands of our mind. We learn as little from observation and experiment as to the fundamental laws of matter,--gravitation, for instance, which Faraday and Herschel termed "the mystery of mysteries," or chemical affinities, or the nature of Ether--as concerning anything in organic nature; though in the latter we undoubtedly mount to a higher plane of mysteriousness. And in either case we could learn nothing whatever,--that is to say, Science would be wholly impossible,--did we not find natural phenomena respond to our enquiries with what seems an intelligence akin to our own. And accordingly it appears but reasonable,--that is to say, truly scientific,--to exclaim as did even Diderot--"Quoi! le monde formé prouverait moins une intelligence que le monde expliqué!" XIII MONISM