anic.

Otherwise, the absurdities into which we should be led must strike every
reflecting mind. The Eternal Sovereign arranges a solar or an astral
system, by dispositions imparted primordially to matter; he causes, by
the same means, vast oceans to join and continents to rise, and all the
grand meteoric agencies to proceed in ceaseless alternation, so as to
fit the earth for a residence of organic beings. But when, in the course
of these operations, fuci and corals are to be, for the first time,
placed in these oceans, a change in his plan of administration is
required. It is not easy to say what is presumed to be the mode of his
operations. The ignorant believe the very hand of Deity to be at work.
Amongst the learned, we hear of "creative fiats," "interferences,"
"interpositions of the creative energy," all of them very obscure
phrases, apparently not susceptible of a scientific explanation, but all
tending simply to this: that the work was done in a marvellous way, and
not in the way of Nature.

But we need not assume two totally distinct modes of the exercise of the
divine power--one in the course of inorganic nature and the other in
intimately connected course of organic nature.

Indeed, when all the evidence is surveyed, it seems difficult to resist
the impression that vestiges, at least, are seen of the manner and
method of the Creator in this part of His work. It appears to be a case
in which rigid proof is hardly to be looked for. But such evidences as
exist are remarkably consistent and harmonious. The theory pointed to
consorts with everything else which we have learned accurately regarding
the history of the universe. Science has not one positive affirmation on
the other side. Indeed, the view opposed to it is not one in which
science is concerned; it appears as merely one of the prejudices formed
in the non-age of our race.

For the history, then, of organic nature, I embrace, not as a proved
fact, but as a rational interpretation of things as far as science has
revealed them, the idea of progressive development. We contemplate the
simplest and most primitive types of being as giving birth to a type
superior to it; this again producing the next higher, and so on to the
highest. We contemplate, in short, a universal gestation of Nature, like
that of the individual being, and attended as little by circumstances of
a miraculous kind as the silent advance of an ordinary mother from one
week to another of