DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 5 



ligent, animate being; such a combination of powers that no 

 form of physical law could possibly be conceived to represent. 

 He must be a bold metaphysician indeed, who could assert such 

 a possibility ! It seems to me that it would be tantamount to 

 declaring an utter impossibility to be possible. 



The form of the argument which I wish to introduce for your 

 consideration is identical, up to a certain point, with just such a 

 one as would be advanced to prove the prevalence of indepen- 

 dent physical law as a controlling power ; but beyond that 

 point I hope I shall be able to show that it may be used as 

 evidence of a thoughtful design to produce a succession of events, 

 or a combination of contemporaneous, interdependent phenom- 



ena.* 



I have chosen for the subject of this course of lectures a 

 somewhat comprehensive field, namely, that of the origin of life 

 and the mode of development of animals, because I do not wish 

 to be limited in what I have to say to a simple narration of the 

 mode of putting together the organization of animals. I have 

 purposely used the term " putting together " here, because that 

 is the general idea of the way in which an organized being is 

 brought into existence. You have been led to think so by 

 various means. In " Paley's Philosophy," a work so extensively 



* In the succession of beings from a lower to a higher type, and a consenta- 

 neous greater degree of complication, we have the strongest proof of an intel- 

 ligent being, designing, ordaining, and controlling. The laws of the older 

 physicists were not claimed to be derived from an intelligence ; they -were 

 deemed to exhibit the necessary operations of matter upon matter ; but when we 

 see that these laws have an order, and, as they are understood at the present 

 day, a rate of succession in their operations, which have the stamp of thoughtful- 

 ness impressed upon them, it is impossible not to discover that they do not work 

 of their own accord, but are controlled by a creative forethought and design. If 

 the product of these causes was a heterogeneous mixture of beings, with no rela- 

 tion whatever among themselves, then one might more plausibly claim that the 

 so-called physical causes had produced living creatures. As it is, though, we 

 have before us animals allied to each other by progressive relations, which 

 finally, if we follow them up, end in the highest forms of life at the present day, 

 from having begun with the lowest and ascended. What mere non-intelligent 

 causation could produce the like ? 



