ACCEPTANCE OF HYPOTHESES. 211 



the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted 

 object we are capable of conceiving namely, the production 

 of the higher animals directly follows. There is grandeur 

 in this view of life, with its several powers having been 

 originally breathed into a few forms or into one ; and that, 

 whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed 

 law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms 

 most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being 

 evolved." Here then, according to his own showing, in- 

 heritance, external conditions, use and disuse, struggle for 

 life, and natural selection, are all fulfilling their parts as 

 co-factors in one great law, and it is strange that in the 

 face of this admission he should labour to ascribe to one 

 cause what would have been much more philosophically 

 and satisfactorily ascribed to the many. He admits, too, the 

 " original breathing of life into a few forms or into one form," 

 and yet unaccountably appeals throughout his argument 

 to chance and nature for all subsequent development, as if 

 these blind deities were aught without the direction of the 

 same original life-breathing Impulse ! If science is con- 

 strained to admit a Divine origination of life, why should 

 she be ashamed to confess to an equally Divine sustaining 

 of its subsequent manifestations 1 If we are compelled to 

 invoke a creative act for a beginning we cannot compre- 

 hend, why should we shrink from appealing to the same 

 cause for subsequent diversities we cannot explain 1 But 

 for this weakness or vanity, the erroneous in these so-called 

 u theories of life" had met with a kindlier tolerance, and 

 the true with a readier acceptance. 



If, as these theorists assert, the question be merely this : 

 Has or has not the Creator endowed inorganic matter with 

 the power of assuming, under the influence of certain forces, 

 an organic form 1 and has or has not the Creator further 

 ordained that under certain external phases of nature these 



