text:  I am convinced that any one accustomed to abstraction and analysis who will fairly exert his faculties for the purpose will when his imagination has once learned to entertain the notion find no difficulty in conceiving that in some one for instance of the many firmaments into which sidereal astronomy now divides the universe events may succeed one another at random without any fixed law; nor can any thing in our experience or in our mental nature constitute a sufficient or indeed any reason for believing that this is nowhere the case