APOLOGY FOB THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 211 



Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the 

 nebular theory as it was held by Kant, Laplace, and 

 William Herschel, and as it is held by the best scien- 

 tific intellects of to-day. According to it, our sun and 

 planets were once diffused through space as an impal- 

 pable haze, out of which, by condensation, came the 

 solar system. What caused the haze to condense? 

 Loss of heat. What rounded the sun and planets? 

 That which rounds a tear molecular force. For aeons, 

 the immensity of which overwhelms man's conceptions, 

 the earth was unfit to maintain what we call life. It is 

 now covered with visible living things. They are not 

 formed of matter different from that of the earth 

 around them. They are, on the contrary, bone of its 

 bone, and flesh of its flesh. How were they intro- 

 duced ? Was life implicated in the nebula as part, it 

 may be, of a vaster and wholly Unfathomable Life ; or 

 is it the work of a Being standing outside the nebula, 

 who fashioned it, and vitalised it ; but whose own 

 origin and ways are equally past finding out ? As far 

 as the eye of science has hitherto ranged through nature, 

 no intrusion of purely creative power into any series of 

 phenomena has ever been observed. The assumption of 

 such a power to account for special phenomena, though 

 often made, has always proved a failure. It is opposed 

 to the very spirit of science ; and I therefore assumed 

 the responsibility of holding up, in contrast with it, 

 that method of nature which it has been the vocation 

 and triumph of science to disclose, and in the applica- 

 tion of which we can alone hope for further light. 

 Holding, then, that the nebulae and the solar system, 

 life included, stand to each other in the relation of the 

 germ to the finished organism, I reaffirm here, not 

 arrogantly, or defiantly, but without a shade of indis- 

 tinctness, the position laid down at Belfast . 



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