192 THE SUCCESSION OF ANIMAL FORMS 



phers, theologians, and the common sense of mankind, that the 

 seen can be explained only by reference to the unseen, and 

 that any merely physical theory of the world is necessarily 

 partial. This, too, is the position of our sacred Scriptures, and 

 is broadly stated in their opening verse, and indeed it lies alike 

 at the basis of all true religion and all sound philosophy, for it 

 must necessarily be that " the things that are seen are temporal, 

 the things that are unseen, eternal." With reference to the 

 primal aggregation of energy in the visible universe, with refer- 

 ence to the introduction of life, with reference to the soul of 

 man, with reference to the heavenly gifts of genius and pro- 

 phecy, with reference to the introduction of the Saviour Himself 

 into the world, and with reference to the spiritual gifts and 

 graces of God's people, all these spring, not from sporadic acts 

 of intervention, but from the continuous action of God and the 

 unseen world ; and this, we must never forget, is the true ideal 

 of creation in Scripture and in sound theology. Only in such 

 exceptional and little influential philosophies as that of Demo- 

 critus, and in the speculations of a few men carried off their 

 balance by the brilliant physical discoveries of our age, has 

 this necessarily partial and imperfect view been adopted. Never, 

 indeed, was its imperfection more clear than in the light of 

 modern science. 



Geology, by tracing back all present things to their origin, 

 was the first science to establish on a basis of observed facts 

 the necessity of a beginning and end of the world. But even 

 physical science now teaches us that the visible universe is a 

 vast machine for the dissipation of energy; that the processes 

 going on in it must have had a beginning in time, and that all 

 things tend to a final and helpless equilibrium. This necessity 

 implies an unseen power, an invisible universe, in which the 

 visible universe must have originated, and to which its energy 

 is ever returning. The hiatus between the seen and the unseen 

 may be bridged over by the conceptions of atomic vortices of 



