CHAPTER I--THE BIRTH OF REASON


[Sidenote: Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible
with a chosen good.]

Whether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning of things is a question once
much debated in the schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so much
because it had been solved as because one party had been silenced by
social pressure. The question is bound to recur in an age when
observation and dialectic again freely confront each other. Naturalists
look back to chaos since they observe everything growing from seeds and
shifting its character in regeneration. The order now established in the
world may be traced back to a situation in which it did not appear.
Dialecticians, on the other hand, refute this presumption by urging that
every collocation of things must have been preceded by another
collocation in itself no less definite and precise; and further that
some principle of transition or continuity must always have obtained,
else successive states would stand in no relation to one another,
notably not in the relation of cause and effect, expressed in a natural
law, which is presupposed in this instance. Potentialities are
dispositions, and a disposition involves an order, as does also the
passage from any specific potentiality into act. Thus the world, we are
told, must always have possessed a structure.

The two views may perhaps be reconciled if we take each with a
qualification. Chaos doubtless has existed and will return--nay, it
reigns now, very likely, in the remoter and inmost parts of the
universe--if by chaos we understand a nature containing none of the
objects we are wont to distinguish, a nature such that human life and