284. THE GENESIS OF SPECIES. [CHAP. 



The perfect orthodoxy of these views is unquestionable. 

 Nothing is plainer from the venerable writers quoted, as well 

 as from a mass of other authorities, than that " the super- 

 natural " is not to be looked for or expected in the sphere 

 of mere Nature. For this statement there is a general con- 

 sensus of theological authority. 



The teaching which the author has received is, that God 

 is indeed inscrutable and incomprehensible to us from the 

 infinity of His attributes, so that our minds can,, as it were, 

 only take in, in a most fragmentary and indistinct manner 

 (as through a glass darkly), dim conceptions of infinitesimal 

 portions of His inconceivable perfection. In this way the 

 partial glimpses obtained by us in different modes differ 

 from each other ; not that God is any thing but the most 

 perfect unity, but that apparently conflicting views arise 

 from our inability to apprehend Him, except in this imper- 

 fect manner, i. e., by successive slight approximations along 

 different lines of approach. Sir William Hamilton has said, 86 

 " Nature conceals God, and man reveals Him." It is not, 

 according to the teaching spoken of, exactly thus; but 

 rather that physical Nature reveals to us one side, one 

 aspect of the Deity, while the moral and religious worlds 

 bring us in contact with another, and at first, to our appre- 

 hension, a very different one. The difference and discrep- 

 ancy, however, which is at first felt, is soon seen to proceed 

 not from the reason, but from a want of flexibility in the 

 imagination. This want is far from surprising. Not only 

 may a man naturally be expected to be an adept in his own 

 art, but at the same time to show an incapacity for a very 

 different mode of activity. 36 We rarely find an artist who 



35 " Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic," vol. i., Lecture ii., p. 40. 



36 In the same way that an undue cultivation of any one kind of 

 knowledge is prejudicial to philosophy. Mr. James Martineau well ob- 

 serves : " Nothing is more common than to see maxims, which are unex- 

 ceptionable as the assumptions of particular sciences, coerced into the 



