e, boasting of the valuable
cosmogonical advice he could have given had he been taken into council;
and one of Kaiser Wilhelm's predecessors on the throne of Prussia
intimating that he, in like case, would have proved conclusively that
pounded quartz and silex may easily be in excess in arable soil. The
creature, then, has intelligence of which the Creator has always been
destitute. Yet the creature can have nothing save what, either directly
or indirectly, he derives from a creator. Wherefore that, in becoming
endowed with intelligence, man must have received from the Creator that
which the Creator had not to give, is an article inseparable from the
profession of faith of those moderate Atheists who are content to regard
man as a creature.

There are, however, others of a more uncompromising temper, who do not
hesitate to pronounce creation, in the sense of formation of something
out of nothing, to be an incomprehensible myth; and it cannot be denied
to these that, however difficult it be to conceive an uncreated universe
existing from all eternity, the conception of an eternally existent
Creator is not one whit easier. Fairly enough, therefore, these may
proceed to argue that in the production of that compound, man, the share
of the agency usually styled creative must have been limited to
combining and arranging the elemental particles of his corporeal moiety.
Quite fairly, advancing still farther, they may hazard a conjecture that
it is from the union of the corporeal constituents of man that the
generation of his spiritual moiety has resulted. But for such generation
it is plainly indispensable that the corporeal constituents should have
been not inert particles but self-acting forces, and that, as such, they
must have been in possession of more or less intelligence, which
intelligence again either was or was not equal in amount to that of the
human spirit or mind generated by them. If it were not equal, then the
forces must have given to their offspring more than they had themselves
got to give--which is sheer nonsense. If it were equal, then, inasmuch
as the human mind is quite clever enough to discover uses for the
various parts of the human body and of other organisms, the forces to
which the human mind owes its origin must be at least equally clever.
The elementary forces by whose action the human and other organic bodies
have been constructed, must have been perfectly aware what they were
constructing, and wha