makes it a greater mystery.
Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by
evolution. A man can put together a machine, but he can not make a
machine develop itself. The ingenious artisan, able as some have been,
so far to imitate vitality as to produce a mechanical piano-forte
player, may in some sort conceive how, by greater skill, a complete man
might be artificially produced; but he is unable to conceive how such a
complex organism gradually arises out of a minute, structureless germ.
That our harmonious universe once existed potentially as formless,
diffused matter, and has slowly grown into its present organized state,
is a far more astonishing fact than would have been its formation after
the artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to
argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular
Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending 'the mechanical
god of Paley,' as this does the fetish of a savage."[200]

The Nebular Hypothesis, then, can not exist without God. However, as it
seems to remove him to a great distance from this present world, both in
space and time, it has become popular with Atheists.

The Nebular Hypothesis, as presented by Atheists, _imagines a state of
primeval matter as simple, or homogeneous, of which science presents no
example, in heaven or on earth_.

This homogeneous condition of matter is the very foundation of the
theory. Spencer reasons at great length, that all progress is from the
simple to the differentiated. And it is indispensable for the Atheists
to prove that the primeval world was composed of matter perfectly simple
and homogeneous. If they alleged that it was composed of several
ingredients, nobody would believe them that this compound was eternal.
There is no conviction of common sense stronger than that every compound
has been put together by some compounder.

They could not persuade a child that a plum pudding made itself, or that
a steamship filled with passengers existed so from eternity, much less a
planet with a much larger crew and company. They therefore alleged that
the first matter of the universe was perfectly homogeneous and simple.
When common people objected that no such thing was to be seen in this
world nowadays, since all things here--stones, water, air, earth,
plants, animals--are compounded and built up out of a great variety of
matters, they claimed that this is the result of the growth