NA TURE AND SCOPE OF E VOL UTION. 15 



action of an all-powerful Creator, or are they rather 

 to be attributed to the operation of certain laws of 

 nature laws which admit of determination by 

 human reason, and which, when known, serve as a 

 norm in our investigations and experiments in the 

 organic and inorganic worlds ? Are there special in- 

 terventions on the part of a Supreme Being in 

 the government of the universe, and are we to look 

 for frequent, if not constant, exhibitions of the mirac- 

 ulous in the natural world ? Has God's first creation 

 of the universe and all it contains, of the earth and 

 all that inhabits it, been followed by other creations 

 at divers periods, and if so, when and where has such 

 creative power been manifested ? 



These are a few of the many questions about the 

 genesis and development of things which men asked 

 themselves in the infancy of our race. And these 

 are questions which philosophers are still putting to 

 themselves, and which, notwithstanding the many 

 thousands of years during which they have been 

 under discussion, have to-day a greater and more 

 absorbing interest than in any former period of 

 human history. 



It is beside my present purpose to enumerate 

 the various theories in science to which the discus- 

 sion of the questions just propounded have given rise, 

 or to dwell on the divers systems of philosophy and 

 religion which have been the natural outgrowth of 

 such or similar discussions. Materialism, Pantheism, 

 Emanationism, Hylozoism, Traducianism, Atheism 

 and other isms innumerable have always been, as they 

 are to-day, more or less closely identified with many 



