Let it be granted that all men grew up from monkeys, and the monkeys from worms, and all worms grew from invisible animalculae, and that the animalculae flashed into life by the chemical contact of the materials of the protoplasm, and that the protoplasm was a natural crop of the cooling globe, and that the cooling globe condensed itself out of fire mist or nebulae or star dust, I demand to know how does all that enable me to get rid of the law of causation?
It is a necessary law of my nature to believe that every effect demands an adequate cause.

It is equally a law of my nature to believe that every compound, or composite substance, is an effect, that the compound did not compound itself.
Here is a great effect--a universe in solution, with all the chemical constituents of our globe and solar system floating in it, and all their laws of chemical affinity and proportion, and all their electrical attractions and repulsions, in full operation (else we would never get a universe to thicken down out of it); and besides, all the potencies of vegetable and animal life, and all the great powers of the human mind, in a rather vaporous condition, it is true, but still all there--Socrates, Seneca and Solomon, Moses, Solon and Blackstone, Homer, Milton and Shakespeare, Demosthenes, Cicero and Daniel Webster, Watt, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse, popes, puritans and evolutionists, universities and newspapers and congresses, the United States and the British Empire, and the rest of mankind--all boiled up into Mr.
Tyndall's potencies, but all there in potency, just as truly as they ever were here in fact.

Well! here is a great effect just as imperatively demanding a great First Cause as the world afterward formed out of it.

These substances did not make themselves then, any more than the resulting persons or paving stones make themselves now, and they did not endow themselves with these potencies, nor calculate and establish these laws of chemical combination in exact proportion, nor determine scientifically the laws of gravitation and electricity and light and heat, before they came into being; which must have all been established before a single particle of the star dust could begin to cool, or to approach another.

The very first idea of matter or of force we can form demands law, and law is merely another name for the divine order of Nature.