CHAP. XII.] CAUSES. 371 



jectively, they have doubtless beauty and perfection such as 

 we elsewhere readily recognise, though such qualities are dis 

 guised from us by our human prejudices. It is surely quite 

 conceivable that even to us, as disembodied spirits, such 

 actions and productions as those referred to may appear 

 in an altogether different light, and we may, so to speak, 

 smile at the childishness of the notion that there could be 

 anything worthy of even the faintest disapproval in that 

 which has really no moral character whatever, but which 

 to us as men is revolting or disgusting. Yet our intellect 

 sees no difficulty in at once believing that, under certain con 

 ditions, what is disgusting to us may be really most admir 

 able, e.g., that a filthy mendicant, loathsome with cutaneous 

 disease and intolerable to smell as much as to sight but 

 with a will most rightly directed, may really be one of the 

 noblest and most glorious objects which the whole material 

 universe presents to its Divine Author, and that angels would 

 turn away with indifference from what men most admire to 

 contemplate such a spectacle. 



Can there, then, be any real difficulty in accepting the 

 belief that the whole material Universe, and all the actions 

 (apart from human volition) performed by it, are really 

 beautiful, from the superhuman point of view, however much 

 the one-sidedness of our view of part of it (through the 

 associations of purely human feeling) may disguise the beauty 

 of such part from us ? 



The fourth objection, that as to the conflict between the 

 ideas of &quot;evolution&quot; and &quot;creation,&quot; has been Fourth oec- 

 specially treated of in the last chapter of the tZ S^&quot; 

 Genesis of Species. Here I will but reaffirm that uon!&quot; 

 the distinction between primary creation and secondary or 

 derivative creation, entirely does away with the difficulty. 

 If, with the great St. Augustine, we believe that the whole 

 material universe was created in one instant, and further 

 accept the view that all its organisms were then created not 

 actually but potentially (to be subsequently evolved into 

 actual existence at due times and seasons when the conditions 



2 B 2 



