Religion and Science
3. The Mechanical Interpretation of the Universe
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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 preceeding 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
