XII.] THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. 295 



could not recognize his father because he could not see him, 

 forgetting that he could hear and feel him. Yet there are 

 some persons who appear to find it unreasonable and absurd 

 that men should regard phenomena in a light not furnished 

 by or to be obtained from the very phenomena themselves, 

 although the men so regarding them avow that the light 

 in which they do view them comes from quite another 

 source. It is as if a man, A, coming into B's room and 

 finding there a butterfly, should insist that B had no right 

 to believe that the butterfly had not flown in at the open 

 window, inasmuch as there was nothing about the room or 

 insect to lead to any otlier belief ; while B can well sustain 

 his right so to believe, he having met C, who told him he 

 brought in the chrysalis and, having seen the insect emerge, 

 took away the skin. 



Owing to a similarly narrow and incomplete view men 

 sometimes ridicule the assertion that human conceptions, 

 such as " the vertebrate idea," &c., are ideas in the mind of 

 God ; as if the assertors either on the one hand pretended to 

 some prodigious intellectual power — a far-reaching genius 

 not possessed by most naturalists — or, on the other hand, 

 as if they detected in the very phenomena furnishing such 

 special conception evidences of Divine imaginings. But 

 let the idea of God according to tliQ highest conceptions 

 of Christianity be once accepted, and then it becomes 

 simply a truism to say that the mind of the Deity contains 

 all that is good and ijositive in the mind of man, 'jjlus, 

 of course, an absolutely inconceivable infinity beyond. 

 Thus such human conceptions may, nay must, be asserted 

 to be at the same time ideas in the Divine mind also, as 

 every real and separate individual that has been, is, or 

 shall be, is present to the same mind ; nay, more, such 



