part, generated also princess bees destined in due season to generate
a working progeny similarly endowed with instincts underived from their
parents; but to suppose further that all this has happened in the total
absence of aim, object, intention, or design. Now that all this should
have so happened, although not absolutely inconceivable, nor, therefore,
absolutely impossible, is surely too incredible to be believed except in
despair of some other hypothesis a trifle less preposterous. It is
surely not worth while to set the doctrine of probabilities so
completely at naught, for the sake of an explanation which avowedly
leaves every difficulty unexplained, referring them all to causes not
simply unknown but unconjecturable. What excuse, then, have
philosophers, of all people, for doing this in preference to the simple
expedient of supposing that, although the parturient bee, queen or
other, cannot intend that any of her progeny should be more bounteously
endowed than herself, there is an independent intelligence that does so
intend? To content oneself with pronouncing such preference to be
eminently unscientific is tenderness of language nearly akin, I fear, to
literary bathos.

III.

I have said that the form of unbelief to which, on the principle of
calling a spade a spade, I have taken the liberty of giving the name of
Scientific Atheism, manifests itself now-a-days rather by ignoration
than by formal denial of God. This, however, is not a new feature in any
atheism really worthy of being styled scientific. Even as Mr. Darwin
verbally recognises a Creator, although without assigning to Him any
share in creation, even so Kant, when more than a century ago
undertaking, in his 'General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial
Bodies,'[42] to account for the constitution and mechanical origin of
the universe on Newtonian principles, spoke of the elements as deriving
their essential qualities from the 'eternal thought of the Divine
Intelligence,' without, however, crediting the said Intelligence with
having interposed in order to carry out His thoughts. 'Give me matter,'
he says, 'and I will build the world;' and without other data than
diffused atoms of matter endowed with simple attractive and repulsive
forces, he proceeds to expound a complete cosmogony.

He pictures to himself the universe as originally an infinite expansion
of minutely subdivided matter, and supposing a single centre of
attraction to be some