9 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



lagged behind. He had paused by the side of the brook, brought 

 his eyes as near as he could to the surface of the water, and was 

 examining with intense interest the subaqueous life which the lit- 

 tle stream contained. After a time he rejoined his companions, 

 and this was his utterance when he joined them : "What an imagi- 

 nation God has ! * The words must have made a deep impression 

 upon my informant's mind ; otherwise he would not have re- 

 tained them in memory, and would not have thought it worth 

 while to repeat them to me. They made a similar impression 

 upon myself when so repeated ; and I can not but regard them as 

 containing a true philosophy of Nature. Whatever may be the 

 power of natural selection, and whatever causes may be at work 

 to produce the varied scene of life which the world contains, you 

 need some underlying cause, both of life itself and of reproduc- 

 tion and variation, and of all natural phenomena ; and if causally 

 the existence of the universe may be attributed to God's will and 

 purpose, so the endless variety of vital manifestations may be 

 attributed to that which in the case of man we should call imagi- 

 nation. 



In reality, whatever may be the actual historical genesis of 

 Nature, we seem to need a guasi-Platonic doctrine of antecedent 

 ideas in the divine mind as the basis, the underlying condition, of 

 the existence of things as we see them. It is matter for fair 

 discussion among naturalists how much may be attributed to 

 natural selection, how much to sexual, how much to physiologi- 

 cal, and so forth. But such discussions can not go to the root of 

 things ; they do not reach the original thought out of which the 

 works of Nature, as we call them, originally spring. Michael 

 Angelo, as we are told, used to sit with his hammer and chisel 

 before his marble block, and shape it without any previous mod- 

 eling process into the figure which he intended to produce ; other 

 sculptors, I believe, with only this one grand exception, make 

 their model in clay, and thence proceed by semi-mechanical steps 

 to the finished work ; but Michael Angelo and all other sculptors 

 have alike the seminal idea in their minds, and the manner of its 

 evolution is comparatively a matter of detail. Something of the 

 same kind may be said of the production of natural things. It 

 may be possible for naturalists to discover some of the steps by 

 which the finished work comes to be what it is ; but the actual 

 origin of natural things — the wonders of life, the varied beauties 

 of the universe, above all, the mind of man, which is capable of 

 understanding, appreciating, and discussing the problems to which 

 natural things give rise — is to be sought in no region lower than 

 that which may, with all reverence, be described as the mind, or 

 as the imagination of God.— Nineteenth Century. 



