alone the cause of man's superior physical and mental
nature,--will, I have no doubt, be over-ruled and explained away. But I
venture to think they will nevertheless maintain their ground, and that
they can only be met by the discovery of new facts or new laws, of a
nature very different from any yet known to us. I can only hope that my
treatment of the subject, though necessarily very meagre, has been clear
and intelligible; and that it may prove suggestive, both to the
opponents and to the upholders of the theory of Natural Selection.

NOTES.

_NOTE A._ (_Page_ 360.)

Some of my critics seem quite to have misunderstood my meaning in this
part of the argument. They have accused me of unnecessarily and
unphilosophically appealing to "first causes" in order to get over a
difficulty--of believing that "our brains are made by God and our lungs
by natural selection;" and that, in point of fact, "man is God's
domestic animal." An eminent French critic, M. Claparede, makes me
continually call in the aid of--"_une Force superieure_," the capital F,
meaning I imagine that this "higher Force" is the Deity. I can only
explain this misconception by the incapacity of the modern cultivated
mind to realise the existence of any higher intelligence between itself
and Deity. Angels and archangels, spirits and demons, have been so long
banished from our belief as to have become actually unthinkable as
actual existences, and nothing in modern philosophy takes their place.
Yet the grand law of "continuity," the last outcome of modern science,
which seems absolute throughout the realms of matter, force, and mind,
so far as we can explore them, cannot surely fail to be true beyond the
narrow sphere of our vision, and leave an infinite chasm between man and
the Great Mind of the universe. Such a supposition seems to me in the
highest degree improbable.

Now, in referring to the origin of man, and its possible determining
causes, I have used the words "some other power"--"some intelligent
power"--"a superior intelligence"--"a controlling intelligence," and
only in reference to the origin of universal forces and laws have I
spoken of the will or power of "one Supreme Intelligence." These are the
only expressions I have used in alluding to the power which I believe
has acted in the case of man, and they were purposely chosen to show,
that I reject the hypothesis of "first causes" for any and every
_special_ effect in the universe, e