throw which he announces in advance. I judge differently, ladies and gentlemen. I say that nature's dice are cogged, and there, above, is the greatest of jugglers making sport of us."
What reply was, on the spot, made to the abbé we know not. But of the impression which the apologue of the cogged dice made on the encyclopædists we learn something from a passage in the "Système de la Nature," that work which, in the opinion of the young Goethe and his Strasburg associates, was "senile, cimmerian, cadaverous, the very quintessence of senility, offensive to all correct taste, nay, insipid." And yet it is not to be denied that the "Système de la Nature," in most points, very nearly represents the idea of the universe now held by scientific men.
In that work Holbach vainly squirms to escape from the snare in which he had been caught by the Neapolitan. "The molecules of matter," says he, "may be likened to cogged dice, i. e., they always produce certain effects of a determinate kind. Inasmuch as these molecules are in themselves and by their combinations essentially diverse, we may say that they are cogged in infinitely diversified ways. The brain of Homer or of Virgil was nothing but an aggregate of molecules, or if you please of cogged dice—i. e., things so constituted and so elaborated that they must of necessity produce an Iliad or an Æneid."
To say nothing of the fact that Holbach speaks of mental phenomena being produced by material conditions as of a self-evident proposition, nothing could be more awkward than the mode in which he strives to wrest the weapon from the hand of his opponent. By adopting the comparison of the molecules of matter with cogged dice, he unwittingly admits that in nature, just as in a gambler's den, there is trickery; whereas the problem before him was to explain how material particles not directed toward any definite end should nevertheless cooperate to that end.
Here is the knot, here the enormous difficulty, that racks every understanding that would comprehend the universe. Whoever will not surrender all occurrences into the hand of Epicurus's Chance, whoever admits even the veriest tittle of the doctrine of teleology, must perforce accept Paley's disparaged natural theology, and this the more inevitably the more clearly and accurately he reasons, the more independently he exercises his judgment. But so weighty and so numerous are the facts which seem to favor teleology; so irresistibly do these facts daily force themselves upon us in common life; so interwoven are final causes with time-honored imaginations of our race instilled into us during childhood, that even minds possessed of considerable powers of abstraction can not in their habitual thoughts refrain from postulating them. A man may, with Lichtenberg, ridicule the teleological explanations offered in earlier times. Be he ever so determined to regard the processes occurring in the animal body simply as effects produced by the mechanical or chemical organs, and so to represent them to others,
