xlviii PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. 



Upon Mr. Sedgwick, and all who adhere to him, must rest the 

 philosophical infamy of resorting to miracle. Our aim has been, is, 

 and must be, with unswerving consistency, to maintain that in nature 

 the Deity manifests, and has ever manifested himself as a God of 

 order, natural laws being simply expressions of his will. We see 

 these " orderly movements" in the present time ; this is admitted on 

 all hands. The question is, whether the commencement of any par- 

 ticular series of phenomena was an orderly movement also. Mr. 

 Sedgwick says, when we are led to speculate on such things, we are 

 " inevitably led to the conception of the First Cause," etc. Why the 

 First Cause then, any more than in the present movements? The 

 mental process he speaks of may be "inevitable" in a mind of such 

 calibre as his ; on that point let there be the utmost toleration. At 

 the same time, with all modest} r , it does not seem to us difficult to 

 get a little farther, and see that what we think the starting of a 

 series of natural phenomena may have only been a new evolution 

 of some previous or larger series, merely a stage in progress, while 

 Professor Sedgwick's necessary idea of a creation not by law is only 

 a somewhat happy example of the form of logic called begging the 

 question. 



One word more : he speaks of the idea of the commencement of 

 animal life after the manner of the development hypothesis as imply- 

 ing a violation of the ordinary course of nature, because no such 

 developments take place now ; but if the following of generation after 

 generation and a constant like-production be the ordinary course of 

 nature at present, the fact itself of the starting of life was something 

 different from that course, which must accordingly be to that extent 

 liable to modification, in the conception of all who speculate on the 

 subject. For Mr. Sedgwick, then, to talk contemptuously of any 

 effort to fill up this gap in our knowledge as something interfering 

 with the sobriety of nature's movements and the constancy of her 

 laws, when he himself is forced by the same " fact" to imagine, what 

 we equally do not see in living nature, the coming forward of the 

 First Cause in some unusual manner, some manner different from 

 the ordinary processes of nature, is surely a singular example of 

 controversial effrontery, if it be not one rather of gross blindness and 

 ignorance. 



We had said at this place that surely such a train of reasoning or 

 so-called reasoning, could impose upon nobody. But it seems right 

 to recal the remark, when we reflect on the ground of objection to 

 the development hypothesis which is commonly heard of among 

 English naturalists. When the idea of an introduction of species 

 into the world by development or modification is talked of, these 

 gentlemen quietly set it aside with the remark, that it cannot have 

 been the case, because there are no such phenomena as the starting of 

 new life or passage from one form to another now, and the question 

 is to be determined by experience. It never occurs to them to apply 

 the same rule to the sole alternative idea of an introduction or modi- 

 fication of life by some miraculous mode. They find no such phe- 



