280 FINAL CAUSES : THEIR BEARING 



founded on this fact of foetal development, that possibly some 

 of the more obscure signs impressed upon the human cha- 

 racter may be best read through the spectacles of natural 

 science. The successive phases of the foetal brain give at 

 least fair warning that, in tracing to its first principles the 

 moral and intellectual nature of man, what is properly his 

 " natural history" should not be overlooked. Oken, after 

 describing the human creature in one passage as " equivalent 

 to the whole animal kingdom," designates him in another as 

 " God wholly manifested," and as " God become man ;" — a 

 style of expression at which the English reader may start, as 

 that of the " big mouth spfeaking blasphemy," but which has 

 become exceedingly common among the rationalists of the 

 Continent. The irreverent- naturalist ought surely to have 

 remembered, that the sum total of all the animals cannot be 

 different in its nature from the various sums of which it is an 

 aggregate, — seeing that no summation ever differs in quality 

 from the items summed up which compose it, — and that, 

 though it may amount in this case to man the animal^ — ^to 

 man as he may be weighed, and measured, and subjected to 

 the dissecting knife, — it cannot possibly amount to God. Is 

 God merely a sum total of birds and beasts, reptiles and fishes, 

 — a mere Egyptian deity, composed of fantastic hieroglyphics 

 derived from the forms of the brute creation ? The impieties 

 of the transcendentalist may, however, serve to illustrate that 

 mode of seizing on terms which, as the most sacred in the 

 message of revelation, have been long coupled in the popular 

 mind with saving truths, and forcibly compelling them to bear 

 some visionary and illusive meaning, wholly foreign to that 

 with which they were originally invested, which has become 

 80 remarkable a part of the policy of modern infidelity. Ka- 

 lionalism has learned to sacrifice to Deity with a certain mea- 

 Bure of conformity to the required pattern ; but it is a con- 

 formity in appearance only, not in reality : the sacrifice al- 



