Geological Society. 3 1 5 



of moral and physical truth, be brought into a general accordance 

 with the known phenomena of nature : and such general accordance 

 I affirm there is between our historical traditions and the phenomena of 

 geology. Both tell us in a language easily understood, though written 

 in far different characters, that man is a recent sojourner on the sur- 

 face of the earth. Again, though we have not yet found the certain 

 traces of any great diluvian catastrophe which we can affirm to be 

 within the human period $ we have, at least, shown, that paroxysms of 

 internal energy, accompanied by the elevation of mountain chains, and 

 followed by mighty waves desolating whole regions of the earth, were 

 a part of the mechanism of nature. And what has happened, again 

 and again, from the most ancient, up to the most modern periods in 

 the natural history of the earth, may have happened once during the 

 few thousand years that man has been living on its surface. We have, 

 therefore, taken away all anterior incredibility from the fact of a 

 recent deluge j and we have prepared the mind, doubting about the 

 truth of things of which it knows not either the origin or the end, for 

 the adoption of this fact on the weight of historic testimony. 



If, Gentlemen, I believed that the imagination, the feelings, the 

 highest capacities of our nature, and the active intellectual powers 

 bearing upon the business of life, were blunted or impaired by the 

 study of our science, I should then regard it as little better than a 

 moral sepulchre, in which, like the strong man, we were burying our- 

 selves and those around us, in ruins of our own creating. But I believe 

 too firmly in the' immutable attributes of that Being, in whom all 

 truth, of whatever kind, finds its proper resting place, to think that 

 the principles of physical and moral truth can ever be in lasting col- 

 lision. And as all the branches of physical science are but different 

 modifications of a few simple laws, and are bound together by the 

 intervention of common objects and common principles ; so also, 

 there are links (less visible, indeed, but not less real) by which they 

 are also bound to the most elevated moral speculations. 



At every step we take in physics, we show a capacity and an appe- 

 tency for abstract general truth ; and in describing material things, 

 we speak of them, not as accidents, but as phenomena under the 

 government'of laws. The very language we use (and it is hardly pos- 

 sible for us to explain our meaning by any other), is the language in 

 which we describe the operations of intelligence and power. And 

 hence we admit, by the very constitution of our intellectual nature, 

 and even in spite of ourselves, an anima mundi pervading all space, 

 existing in all times, and under all conditions of being. 



But we do not stop here j for the moment we pass on to that por- 

 tion of matter, which is subservient to the functions of life, we there 

 find all the phenomena of organization : and in all those beings the 

 functions of which we comprehend, we see traces of structure in many 

 parts as mechanical as the works of our own hands, and, so far, differ- 

 ing from them only in complexity and perfection j and we see all 

 this subservient to an end, and that end accomplished. Hence, we 

 are compelled to regard the anima mundi no longer as a uniform and 



2 S 2 quiescent 



