54 Darwinism and Other Essays. 



phenomenal manifestations of which the world is 

 made up there is no miraculous break, no con- 

 juring, no freak of the magician. And to this 

 conclusion all modern scientific inquiry has long 

 been leading us. It needed no Dr. Biichner to 

 tell us this. 



All this, however, cannot stir us one inch to- 

 ward the philosophic doctrine of which Dr. Biich- 

 ner is the advocate. Dr. Biichner shares with 

 the theologians whom he combats the error of 

 supposing that godhood cannot be manifested in 

 a regular series of phenomena, but only in fortui- 

 tous miraculous surprises. When he has proved 

 that mankind was originated through the ordi- 

 nary processes of paternity from some lower form 

 of life, he thinks he has overturned the belief in 

 God, whereas he has really only overturned a 

 crude and barbarous conception of the way in 

 which God acts. And so when it is shown that 

 all the phenomena of the world can be explained 

 in conformity to a doctrine of evolution which 

 originated in the study of material phenomena, 

 our author thinks that the ground-theorem of ma- 

 terialism is forever established ; quite forgetting 

 that what we call material phenomena are, after 

 all said and done, nothing but expressions for cer- 

 tain changes occurring in a complicated series of 

 psychical states. 



