III The Mechanical Interpretation of the Universe

The Mechanical Interpretation of the Univers of these conditions? Is just the coming about of one chance event sufficient reason for all these events to go on flawlessly, unceasingly, for millions and millions of years, without the slightest aberration? Are there any real grounds for accepting that an allegedly chance or accidental event can spontaneously develop the attribute of continuous evolution? In spite of these suppositions resting on such shaky premises, they have been almost universally accepted as an ‘answer’ to the question of the origin of the universe. This is a question whose answer leads to another, more important question: “Who makes this great machine move with such perfect regularity?” The creator—chance—cannot be held to be the Lord of the Universe. Such an explanation would, by its very nature, require two ‘gods’. The first movement might conceivably be attributed to chance, but not so the subsequent continuous motion. We should have to find another ‘god’ to fit that explanation. The establishment of the principle of causation appeared to offer a solution. A cause was found invariably to produce the same effect. What happened at any instant did not depend on the volitions of extraneous beings but followed inevitably by inexorable laws from the state of things, at the preceding event. And this state of things had in turn been inevitably determined by an earlier state, and so on indefinitely, so that the whole course of events had been unalterably determined by the state in which the world found itself at the first instant of its history; once this had been fixed, nature could move only along one road to a predestined end. In brief, the act of creation had created not only the universe but its whole future history. Thus, the law of causation took charge of all such events as had previously been assigned to the actions of supernatural beings. The final establishment of this law as the primary guiding principle in nature was the triumph of the seventeenth century. Out of this resulted a movement to interpret the whole material universe as a machine, a movement which steadily gained force until its culmination in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was then