APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 209 



not, in the abstract, constitute a sufficient ground for 

 censure. There must have been something in my par- 

 ticular mode of crossing it which provoked this tremen- 

 dous ' chorus of dissent/ 



Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the 

 nebular theory as it was held by Kant, Laplace, and 

 William Herschel, and as it is held by the best scien- 

 tific intellects of to-day. According to it, our sun and 

 planets were once diffused through space as an impal- 

 pable haze, out of which, by condensation, came the 

 solar system. What caused the haze to condense? 

 Loss of heat. What rounded the sun and planets? 

 That which rounds a tear molecular force. For aeons, 

 the immensity of which overwhelms man's conceptions, 

 the earth was unfit to maintain what we call life. It is 

 now covered with visible living things. They are not 

 formed of matter different from that of the earth 

 around them. They are, on the contrary, bone of its 

 bone, and flesh of its flesh. How were they intro- 

 duced ? Was life implicated in the nebula as part, it 

 may be, of a vaster and wholly Unfathomable Life; or 

 is it the work of a Being standing outside the nebula, 

 who fashioned it, and vitalised it; but whose own ori- 

 gin and ways are equally past finding out? As far as 

 the eye of science has hitherto ranged through nature, 

 no intrusion of purely creative power into any series 

 of phenomena has ever been observed. The assump- 

 tion of such a power to account for special phenomena, 

 though often made, has always proved a failure. It is 

 opposed to the very spirit of science; and I therefore 

 assumed the responsibility of holding up, in contrast 

 with it, that method of nature which it has been the vo- 

 cation and triumph of science to disclose, and in the 

 application of which we can alone hope for further 

 light. Holding, then, that the nebula? and the solar 



