ns, we can from the religious point of view but welcome
the idea of a descent of species. Philologists have, if we are correctly
informed, the canon that as a rule the more difficult text is the more
correct one; but we doubt whether those should adopt this canon who try to
read in the book of nature, whether with the eye of science or with that of
religion--unless the faculty of reasoning is given to us in order to
conceal the truth.

But, we have also to look for a manner of reconciling theism with all the
different possibilities under which a descent is at all reasonable and
conceivable. One of these possibilities is that of an entirely successive
development of species out of one another by imperceptibly small
transitions; and of this we shall soon speak. Another is the possibility of
a descent by leaps, through a metamorphosis of germs or a heterogenetic
generation. The real causes of such a heterogenetic generation, if it took
place at all, have not yet been found; therefore we have to treat only of
the abstract possibilities of its conceivableness. There are two such
possibilities.

The birth of a new species took place in one of two ways: Either to those
materials and forces which formed the germ of the new species, were added
entirely new metaphysical agencies which did not exist before, and only the
basis and the frame within which the new appeared, or that which the new
species has in common with the old mother-species had the cause of its
existence in the preceding. Likewise even the original productions {262} of
man are always composed of two factors--of the given pre-suppositions and
conditions, and of the new which on their basis and within their frame
comes into existence. Otherwise the causes of the new which was to
originate already lay in all former stages, but were still latent and still
hindered in their activity, and only at the time of the birth the new
impulse came which set them free for their activity. This new impulse may
very well belong to the causal connection of the universe, and be caused by
something analogous to natural selection.

In the first case, which in its application to the origin of man is adopted
by A. R. Wallace and Karl Snell, the reconciliation between descent and
theism has not the least difficulty; for if the agency which in the
new-appearing species produces that which is specifically new in it, came
only into existence with the first formation of the germs of the new