638 UNITY OF DESIGN. 



fancies that he can supersede the operations of 

 Divine agency.* 



Very different was the humble spirit of the 

 great Newton, who, struck with the immensity 

 of nature, compared our knowledge of her ope- 

 rations, into which he had himself penetrated so 

 deeply, to that of a child gathering pebbles on 

 the sea shore. Compared, indeed, with the 

 magnitude of the universe, how narrow is the 

 field of our perceptions, and how far distant 

 from any approximation to a knowledge of the 

 essence of matter, of the source of its powers, or 

 even of the ultimate configurations of its parts ! 

 How remote from all human cognizance are the 

 intimate properties of those imponderable agents, 

 Light, Heat, and Electricity, which pervade 

 space, and exercise so potent a control over all 

 the bodies in nature! Doubtless there exist 



* Allusion is here made to the celebrated theory of Lamarck, 

 as exposed in his " Philosophic Zoologique." He conceives 

 that there was originally no distinction of species, but that each 

 race has, in the course of ages, been derived from some other, 

 less perfect than itself, by a spontaneous effort at improvement ; 

 and he supposes that infusorial animalcules, spontaneously 

 formed out of organic molecules, gave birth, by successive trans- 

 formations, to all other animals now existing on the globe. He 

 believes that tribes, originally aquatic, acquired by their own 

 efforts, prompted by their desire to walk, both feet and legs, 

 fitting them for progression on the ground; and that these 

 members, by the long continued operation of the wish to fly, 

 were transformed into wings, adapted to gratify that desire. If 

 this be philosophy, it is such as might have emanated from the 

 college of Laputa. 



