104 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 



in fact, no science can exist. This analogy of forms (in so 

 far as they seem to have been produced in accordance with 

 a common prototype, notwithstanding their great variety) 

 strengthens the supposition that they have an actual blood- 

 relationship, due to origination from a common parent; a 

 supposition which is arrived at by observation of the 

 graduated approximation of one class of animals to another, 

 beginning with the one in which the principle of purposive- 

 ness seems to be most conspicuous, that is man, and extend- 

 ing down to the polyps, and from these even down to mosses 

 and lichens, and arriving finally at raw matter, the lowest 

 stage of nature observable by us. From this matter and 

 its forces the whole apparatus of Nature seems to have 

 descended according to mechanical laws (such as those 

 which she follows in the production of crystals) ; yet this 

 apparatus, as seen in organic beings, is so incomprehensible 

 to us, that we feel ourselves compelled to conceive for it a 

 different principle. But it would seem that the archaeologist 

 of Nature is at liberty to regard the great Family of 

 creatures (for as a Family we must conceive it, if the above- 

 mentioned continuous and connected relationship has a real 

 foundation) as having sprung from the immediate results of 

 her earliest revolutions, judging from all the laws of their 

 mechanism known to or conjectured by him." 



If we take this remarkable passage out of Kant's 

 " Criticism of the Teleological Faculty of Judgment," and 

 consider it by itself, we cannot but be astonished to find 

 how profoundly and clearly the great thinker, even in 1790, 

 had recognized the inevitable necessity of the Doctrine 

 of Descent, and designated it as the only possible way of 

 explaining organic nature by mechanical laws — that is, by 



