Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Scientific Roll, and Magazine of Systematized Notes, Vol. 1: November, 1880; Climate Indeed, it would be felt that only two positions can be consistently maintained - the one is that everything is a matter of chance, the other that everything is a matter of law; or, in other words, that the universe is under the rule of nothing (which is tantamount to saying it is under no rule at all), or the rule of God. There is no middle position, so that when anything is said to happen by chance, the meaning must be understood to be that it happens according to certain laws, but owing to ignorance of those laws, the how and the why such a thing has happened is beyond the present condition of our understanding. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.