But the best calculated results which it can give us are never absolute probabilities: they are purely relative to the extent of our information. It seems to be impossible for us to judge how far our experience gives us adequate information of the universe as a whole, and of all the forces and phenomena which can have place therein."[454] 2. It is an immediate fact of consciousness that the will is a cause which is adequate to the production of a diversity of effects. Whatever may be true of the world of matter, it is certain that within the sphere of our conscious personality the relation of cause and effect is not a relation of invariable and necessary sequence. Further, it is certain that a self-determining agent exists. "Every event in the universe of matter is determined by the events which precede it, but physical reasonings make it certain that the chain of causes and effects can not have been of absolutely endless length through past time. There must have been a first link of the chain; there must have been a first act of causation; and this act must have been determined, not by any previous act of causation when as yet there was none, but by the free self-determining power of the agent. The first act of causation we call Creation; the freely self-determining agent we call God."[455] 3. Physical science itself does not teach that the course of nature is absolutely uniform; on the contrary, all the conclusions of science lead to the conviction "that the universe is ever changing, and that, notwithstanding secular recurrences which would _primâ facie_ seem to replace matter in its original position, nothing in fact ever returns or can return to a state of existence _identical_ with a previous state."[456] Every theory of the origin of things is compelled to assume that an innate tendency to _variability_ is a fundamental fact of nature. This is made apparent by the reasoning in Spencer's chapters on "The Instability of the Homogeneous" and "The Multiplication of Effects."[457] The advocates of Natural Selection are very emphatic in the assertion of this "Law of Variation," as the cardinal fact upon which turns their doctrine of the origin of species, and the whole system on which organic life has been developed from the lowest to the highest forms.[458] "There is," says Comte, "an irregular variability of effect engendered by the great number of different agents determining at the same time the same phenomena [meteorological, social, and vital], from which it results in the most complicated phenomena that _there are not two cases precisely alike_." "The multiplicity [of the agents] renders the effects as irregularly variable as if every cause had not been subjected to any previous conditions."[459] Dr. Tyndall himself is in fact compelled to surrender the doctrine of uniformity in the succession of phenomena. He says "if the force be permanent, the phenomena are necessary whether they _resemble_ or do not resemble any