510 ON THE SUCCESSIVE FORMS 



ecuted it: of its duration in the past, I uhall presently 

 show reasons for believing that we can prove a com- 

 mencement, though not the date of that. 



When I say that its duration is within the power 

 of its Creator, I do not allude to a mere act of Will. 

 The secondary causes are ready, and ever active. The 

 Mathematician, accustomed to the sole contemplation 

 of his own science, has forgotten that the laws of Me- 

 chanics comprise but orfb of two great powers in the 

 Universe. Chemistry is the other right hand of the 

 Creator: the source of change, the joint governor with 

 Mechanics; the opposing power, when its power is 

 required. This mathematician, writing on Geology, 

 should not have forgotten that: as a mere astro- 

 nomer, he ought not; for that Chemistry is acting in 

 the Comets and in the Sun, as it has acted and is acting in 

 every planetary and solar body throughout the universe. 

 Its great agencies have been overlooked or forgotten in 

 the exclusive pursuits of the Mechanical philosophy. 



It is said also that the laws of animated coincide with 

 those of inanimate existence. I have answered this 

 already. I have shown the high probability that Life 

 has been more than once destroyed and renovated, 

 that it has had many commencements ; the certainty, 

 assuredly, that it must have had at least one, and that 

 one at a far later date than the creation of the Earth 

 itself; though this is implied in the very production 

 of the Earth within Time. How that point is related 

 to the commencement of the earth itself, it is in vain 

 to speculate. It is a moral argument for their near 

 coincidence, that the object of the Deity in Creation 

 was Life : yet to Him to whom Time is nothing, it 

 were nothing though an unanimated globe had revolved 

 for ages in the general system. And any second 

 commencement of Life implies a previous destruction; 

 whence it is not necessarily perdurable in the future, as 



