AS APPLIED TO MAN. 359 



evidently essential to the perfect development of man 

 as a spiritual being, but are utterly inconceivable as 

 having been produced through the action of a law 

 which looks only, and can look only, to the immediate 

 material welfare of the individual or the race. 



The inference I would draw from this class of phe- 

 nomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the 

 development of man in a definite direction, and for a 

 special purpose, just as man guides the development of 

 many animal and vegetable forms. The laws of evolu- 

 tion alone would, perhaps, never have produced a grain 

 so well adapted to man's use as wheat and maize ; such 

 fruits as the seedless banana and bread-fruit ; or such 

 animals as the Guernsey milch cow, or the London 

 dray-horse. Yet these so closely resemble the unaided 

 productions of nature, that we may well imagine a 

 being who had mastered the laws of development of or- 

 ganic forms through past ages, refusing to believe that 

 any new power had been concerned in their produc- 

 tion, and scornfully rejecting the theory (as my theory 

 will be rejected by many who agree with me on other 

 points), that in these few cases a ^controlling intelli- 

 gence had directed the action of the laws of variation, 

 multiplication, and survival, for his own purposes. "We 

 know, however, that this has been done ; and we must 

 therefore admit the possibility that, if we are not the 

 highest intelligences in the universe, some higher intel- 

 ligence may have directed the process by which the 

 human race was developed, by means of more subtle 

 agencies than we are acquainted with. At the same 



