To ascribe the origination of order to _law_ is a manifest evasion of the real problem. Law is order. Law is the very thing to be explained. The question is--Has law a reason, or is it without a reason? The unperverted human mind cannot believe it to be without a reason. "The existence of a law connecting and governing any class of phenomena implies a presiding intelligence which has preconceived and established the law. The regulation of events by precise rules of time and space, of number and measure, is evidence of thought and mind." So says Dr Whewell; and the statement is amply justified by the fact, that all laws and rules in the universe imply that existences are related to one another in a way of which intelligent adjustment alone is the adequate and ultimate explanation. The existence of a law uniformly involves the coexistence of several conditions, and that is a phenomenon which, whenever the conditions and law are physically ultimate, and consequently physically inexplicable, clearly presupposes mind. Laws, in a word, are not the causes but the expressions of order. They are themselves the results of delicately accurate adjustments, which indicate the operation of a divine wisdom. There are chemical laws, for example, simply because there are chemical elements endowed with affinities, attractions, or forces the most diverse, yet so balanced and harmonised as to secure the welfare of the world. Besides, laws do not act of themselves. No law produces of itself any result. It is the agents which act according to the law that produce results, and the nature of the result produced depends on the number and character of the agents, and how each is situated and circumstanced. If the agents oppose each other, or are inappropriately distributed, they bring about disorder and disaster in conformity to law. There is no calamity, no evil, no scene of confusion, in the known world, which is not the result of the action of agents which operate in strictest accordance to law. The law of gravitation might rule every particle of matter, and yet conflict and confusion and death would prevail throughout the entire solar system were harmony and stability and life not secured by very special arrangements. Matter might have all its present inherent and essential laws, and yet remain for ever a chaos. Apart from a designing and superintending intelligence, the chances in favour of chaos and against cosmos, even allowing matter to have uncreated properties and laws, were incalculable. The obvious inference is that which Professor Jevons expresses in these words--"As an unlimited number of atoms can be placed in unlimited space in an unlimited number of modes of distribution, there must, even granting matter to have had all its laws from eternity, have been at some moment in time, out of the unlimited choices and distributions possible, that one choice and distribution which yielded the fair and orderly universe