AGASSIZ AND DARWINISM. 701 



every moment of that conscious intelligence which enables us to bear 

 witness to them, we know they are works from which the essential re- 

 lation of a given effect to its adequate cause is never absent. And for 

 this reason, if we view the matter in pure accordance with experience, 

 we are led to maintain that the antagonism or contrariety which seems 

 to exist in Prof. Aerassiz's mind between the action of God and the 

 action of natural forces is nothing but a figment of that ancestral im- 

 agination from which the lessons which shaped Prof. Agassiz's ways 

 of thinking were derived. So far as experience can tell us any thing, 

 it tells us that divine action is the action of natural forces; for, if we 

 refuse to accept this conclusion, what have we to do but retreat to the 

 confession that we have no experience of divine action whatever, and 

 that the works of God have been made manifest only to those who 

 lived in that unknown time when Aladdin's palaces were built, and 

 when species were created, in a single night, without the intervention 

 of any natural process ? 



Trusting, then, in this universal teaching of experience, let us for 

 a moment face fairly the problem which the existence of men upon the 

 earth presents to us. Here is actually existing a group of organisms, 

 which we call the human race. Either it has existed eternally, or 

 some combination of circumstances has determined its coming into 

 existence. The first alternative is maintained by no one, and our 

 astronomical knowledge of the past career of our planet is sufficient 

 decisively to exclude it. There is no doubt that at some time in the 

 past the human race did not exist, and that its gradual or sudden 

 coming into existence was determined by some combination of circum- 

 stances. Now, when Prof. Agassiz asks us to see, in this origination 

 of mankind, the working of a Divine Power, we acquiesce in all rever- 

 ence. But when he asks us to see in this origination of mankind the 

 working of a Divine Power, instead of the working of natural causes, 

 we do not acquiesce, because, so far as experience has taught us any 

 thing, it has taught us that Divine Power never works except by the 

 way of natural causation. Experience tells us that God causes Alad- 

 din's palaces to come into existence gradually, through the coopera- 

 tion of countless minute antecedents. And it tells us, most emphati- 

 cally, that such structures do not come into existence without an 

 adequate array of antecedents, no matter what the Arabian Nights 

 may tell us to the contrary. 



Now, when Prof. Agassiz asks us to believe that species have come 

 into existence by means of a special creative fiat, and not through 

 the operation of what are called natural causes, we reply that his 

 request is mere inanity and nonsense. We have no reason to suppose 

 that any creature like a man, or any other vertebrate, or articulate, or 

 mollusk, ever came into existence by any other process than the 

 familar process of physical generation. To ask us to believe in any 

 other process is to ask us to abandon the experience which we have 



