10 ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION 



the same pursuit, recognizes his glorious affinity with the Creator, 

 and in deepest gratitude for so sublime a birthright strives to be the 

 faithful interpreter of that Divine Intellect with whom he is per- 

 mitted, nay, with whom he is intended, according to the laws of his 

 being, to enter into communion? 



I confess that this question as to the nature and foundation of our 

 scientific classifications appears to me to have the deepest importance, 

 an importance far greater indeed than is usually attached to it. If it 

 can be proved that man has not invented, but only traced this system- 

 atic arrangement in nature, that these relations and proportions 

 which exist throughout the animal and vegetable world have an in- 

 tellectual, and ideal connection in the mind of the Creator, that this 

 plan of creation, which so commends itself to our highest wisdom, 

 has not grown out of the necessary action of physical laws, but was 

 the free conception of the Almighty Intellect, matured in his 

 thought, before it was manifested in tangible external forms — if, 

 in short, we can prove premeditation prior to the act of creation, 

 we have done once and for ever with the desolate theory which refers 

 us to the laws of matter as accounting for all the wonders of the uni- 

 verse and leaves us with no God but the monotonous, unvarying 

 action of physical forces, binding all things to their inevitable des- 

 tiny.^ I think our science has now reached that degree of advance- 

 ment in which we may venture upon such an investigation. 



^ I allude here only to the doctrines of materialists; but I feel it necessary to add 

 that there are physicists who might be shocked at the idea of being considered as 

 materialists who are yet prone to believe that when they have recognized the laws 

 which regulate the physical world and acknowledged that these laws were established 

 by the Deity, they have explained everything, even when they have considered only 

 the phenomena of the inorganic world, as if the world contained no living beings and 

 as if these living beings exhibited nothing that differed from the inorganic world. 

 Mistaking for a causal relation the intellectual connection observable between serial 

 phenomena, they are unable to perceive any difference between disorder and the free, 

 independent, and self-possessed action of a superior mind, and call mysticism even a 

 passing allusion to the existence of an immaterial principle in animals, which 

 they acknowledge themselves in man. (Powell, Essays, pp. 385, 466, 478). I would 

 further remark, that, when speaking of creation in contradistinction with repro- 

 duction, I mean only to allude to the difference there is between the regular 

 course of phenomena in nature and the establishment of that order of things, 

 without attempting to explain either; for in whatever manner any state of things 

 which has prevailed for a time upon earth may have been introduced, it is self- 

 evident that its establishment and its maintenance for a determined period are 

 two very different things, however frequently they may be mistaken as identical. It is 

 further of itself plain that the laws which may explain the phenomena of the material 

 world, in contradistinction from the organic, cannot be considered as accounting for 



