There is no denying, then, that the universe is to a great extent an effect, an event, something which has begun to be, a process of becoming. Science is, day by day, year by year, finding out more and more that it is an effect. The growth of science is in great part merely the extension of the proof that the universe is an effect. But the scientific proof of the non-eternity of matter is as yet far from a complete one. It leaves it possible for the mind to refer the phases through which the universe has passed, and the forms which it has assumed, to an underlying eternal source in nature itself, and, therefore, not to God. And this is by far the most plausible and forcible way of combating the argument we are employing. It meets it with a direct counter-argument, which every person must acknowledge to be relevant, and which, if sufficiently made out, is obviously decisive. That counter-argument we are bound, therefore, to dispose of. It has been thus stated by Mr J. S. Mill: "There is in nature a permanent element, and also a changeable: the changes are always the effects of previous changes; the permanent existences, so far as we know, are not effects at all. It is true we are accustomed to say not only of events, but of objects, that they are produced by causes, as water by the union of hydrogen and oxygen. But by this we only mean that when they begin to exist, their beginning is the effect of a cause. But their beginning to exist is not an object, it is an event. If it be objected that the cause of a thing's beginning to exist may be said with propriety to be the cause of the thing itself, I shall not quarrel with the expression. But that which in an object begins to exist, is that in it which belongs to the changeable element in nature; the outward form and the properties depending on mechanical or chemical combinations of its component parts. There is in every object another and a permanent element--viz., the specific elementary substance or substances of which it consists and their inherent properties. These are not known to us as beginning to exist: within the range of human knowledge they had no beginning, and consequently no cause; though they themselves are causes or non-causes of everything that takes place. Experience, therefore, affords no evidences, not even analogies, to justify our extending to the apparently immutable, a generalisation grounded only on our observation of the changeable."[15] [15] Three Essays on Religion, pp. 142, 143.