RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 471 



mostly without consciousness that they were either furthering or hin- 

 dering human progress, how happens it that such benefits have been 

 achieved, and to what shall we attribute achievement of them?" 



To Mr. Harrison, if his allegiance to his master is unqualified, no 

 answer which he will think satisfactory can be given ; for M. Comte 

 negatives the recognition of any cause for the existence of human be- 

 ings and the " Great Being " composed of them. It was one of his 

 strange inconsistencies that, though he held it legitimate to inquire 

 into the evolution of the Solar System (as is shown by his acceptance 

 of the nebular hypothesis), and though he treats of human society as 

 a product of evolution, yet all that region lying between the forma- 

 tion of planets and the origin of primitive man, was interdicted by him. 

 To those, however, who accept the doctrine of organic evolution, either 

 svith or without the doctrine of evolution at large, the obvious answer 

 to the above question will be that if " veneration and gratitude " are 

 due at all, they are due to that Ultimate Cause from which Humanity, 

 individually and as a whole, in common with all other things, has pro- 

 ceeded. There is nothing in embodied Humanity but what results 

 from the properties of its units — ^properties mainly prehistoric, and in 

 a small measure generated by social life. If we ask whence come these 

 properties — these structures and functions, bodily and mental — we 

 must go for our answer to the slow operation of those processes of 

 modification and complication through which, with the aid of surround • 

 ing conditions, ever themselves growing more involved, there have 

 been produced the multitudinous organic types, up to the highest. If 

 we persist in putting question beyond question, we are carried back to 

 those more general causes which determined the structure and compo- 

 sition of the Earth during its concentration ; and eventually we are 

 carried back to the nebulous mass in which there existed, undistin- 

 guished into those concrete forms we now know, the forces out of which 

 all things contained in the Solar System have come, and in which 

 there must have been, as Professor Tyndall expresses it, " the promise 

 and potency of all terrestrial life." Whether we contemplate such 

 external changes as those of stars moving ten miles per second, and 

 those which now in hours, now in years, now in centuries, arrange 

 molecules into a crystal ; or whether we contemplate internal changes, 

 arising in us as ideas and feelings, and arising also in the chick which 

 but a few weeks since was a viscid yelk, we are compelled to recog- 

 nize everywhere an Energy capable of all forms and which has been 

 ever assuming new forms, from the remotest time to which science 

 carries us back down to the passing moment. If we take the highest 

 product of evolution, civilized human society, and ask to what agency 

 all its marvels must be credited, the inevitable answer is — To that Un- 

 known Cause of which the entire Cosmos is a manifestation. 



A spectator who, seeing a bubble floating on a great river, had his 

 attention so absorbed by the bubble that he ignored the river — nay, 



