Theodicy | Page 6

know which form is going to capture it. No amount of study
bestowed on the common material nature will enable us to judge how it
will behave under the persuasion of the higher organizing form. The
only way to discover that is to examine the higher form itself.
Every form, then, will really be the object of a distinct science. The
form of the sheep and the form of the dog have much in common, but
that merely happens to be so; we cannot depend upon it, or risk
inferences from sheep to dog: we must examine each in itself; we shall
really need a science of probatology about sheep, and cynology about
dogs. Again, the common material nature has its own principles of
being and action, so it will need a science of itself, which we may call
hylology. Each of these sciences is mistress in her own province; but
how many there are, and how puzzlingly they overlap! So long as we
remain within the province of a single science, we may be able to think
rigorously, everything will be 'tight'. But as soon as we consider
border-issues between one province and another, farewell to exactitude:
everything will be 'loose'. We can think out hylology till we are blue in
the face, but we shall never discover anything about the entry of
material elements into higher organizations, or how they behave when
they get there. We may form perfect definitions and descriptions of the
form of the dog as such, and still derive no rules for telling what
elements of matter will enter into the body of a given dog or how they
will be placed when they do. All we can be sure of is, that the dog-form
will keep itself going in, and by means of, the material it
embodies--unless the dog dies. But what happens to the matter in the
body of the dog is 'accidental' to the nature of the matter; and the use of
this matter, rather than of some other equally suitable, is accidental to
the nature of the dog.
No account of material events can dispense with accidental relations
altogether. We must at least recognize that there are accidental relations
between particular things. Accident in the sense of brute fact had to be
acknowledged even by the tidiest and most dogmatic atomism of the
last century. That atomism must allow it to be accidental, in this sense,

that the space surrounding any given atom was occupied by other
atoms in a given manner. It belonged neither to the nature of space to
be occupied by just those atoms in just those places, nor to the nature of
the atoms to be [17] distributed just like that over space; and so in a
certain sense the environment of any atom was an accidental
environment. That is, the particular arrangement of the environment
was accidental. The nature of the environment was not accidental at all.
It was proper to the nature of the atom to be in interaction with other
atoms over a spatial field, and it never encountered in the
fellow-denizens of space any other nature but its own. It was not
subject to the accident of meeting strange natures, nor of becoming
suddenly subject to strange or unequal laws of interaction. All
interactions, being with its own kind, were reciprocal and obedient to a
single set of calculable laws.
But the medieval philosophy had asserted accidental relations between
distinct sorts of natures, the form of living dog and the form of dead
matter, for example. No one could know a priori what effect an
accidental relation would produce, and all accidental relations between
different pairs of natures were different: at the most there was analogy
between them. Every different nature had to be separately observed,
and when you had observed them all, you could still simply write an
inventory of them, you could not hope to rationalize your body of
knowledge. Let us narrow the field and consider what this doctrine
allows us to know about the wood of a certain kind of tree. We shall
begin by observing the impressions it makes on our several senses, and
we shall attribute to it a substantial form such as naturally to give rise
to these impressions, without, perhaps, being so rash as to claim a
knowledge of what this substantial form is. Still we do not know what
its capacities of physical action and passion may be. We shall find them
out by observing it in relation to different 'natures'. It turns out to be
combustible by fire, resistant to water, tractable to the carpenter's tools,
intractable to his digestive organs, harmless to ostriches, nourishing to
wood-beetles. Each of these capacities of the wood is distinct; we
cannot relate them intelligibly to one