DOCTRINE OF SPECIAL CREATION 429 
sions are right, and in so far as we really desire to understand 
the world about us with a view to living in it as best we may, 
we cannot help wishing to have our beliefs regarding origins 
harmonize with what we do know. So far as they are in 
accord with facts, such beliefs help us to put our facts in 
order so that we may use them to best advantage in living 
and thinking. Our supreme test of the value and truth of 
any such belief is the extent to which it enables us to fit fact 
with fact, and leads us to new facts of importance. Our 
method must be to apply this test to those beliefs which have 
been most widely held about the origin of living things. We 
may be sure that every such belief expresses important 
truths because of the many facts it must explain in order 
to be widely accepted. It is, of course, our business to seek 
truths of importance wherever they may be found, and to 
adopt the most promising belief until a plainly more truthful 
view is presented. 
164. The doctrine of special creation. Linnzeus embodied 
the belief of his own age and of former times in the famous 
saying, “We reckon so many species as there were distinct 
forms created in the beginning.’”’ This belief assumes that 
in somewhat the same way as men have fashioned artificial 
objects for various uses, so superior beings or one Supreme 
Being of transcendent wisdom and power, created in the 
beginning originals of all the different kinds of plants and 
animals, fitting each to occupy its proper place, and endowing 
each with the power of perpetuating its like in progeny. In 
other words, all the living representatives of each species 
are regarded as the descendants of a first original or pair which 
was specially created by God, as a distinct and entirely new 
production, in the most suitable part of the earth, when the 
world was young; from which place and since which time 
the species has been distributed over the area that it now 
occupies. Furthermore, the peculiarities which characterize 
its living representatives are held to be the same that were 
impressed in the beginning upon the original progenitors of 
the species. 
The view above outlined is known as the doctrine of fixity 
of species, or special creation, or as creationism. Since it 
