TELEOLOGY OF THE EVOLUTIONIST. 33 



that it is not permitted us to go beyond it, we neglect 

 all that may enable us to do so." * 



Or may we not say that the unseen parts of God 

 are those deep buried histories, the antiquity and the 

 repeatedness of which go as far beyond that of any 

 habit handed down to us from our earliest protoplasmic 

 ancestor, as the distance of the remotest star in space 

 transcends our distance from the sun ? 



By vivisection and painful introspection we can re- 

 discover many a long buried history rekindling that 

 sense of novelty in respect of its action, whereby we 

 can alone become aware of it. But there are other 

 remoter histories, and more repeated thoughts and 

 actions, before which we feel so powerless to reawaken 

 fresh interest concerning them, that we give up the 

 attempt in despair, and bow our heads, overpowered by 

 the sense of their immensity. Thus our inability to 

 comprehend God is coextensive with our difficulty in 

 going back upon the past and our sense of him is a 

 dim perception of our own vast and now inconceivably 

 remote history. 



* Tom. ii. p. 486, 1794. 



