EVOLUTION AND THEISM. 39S 



tinguished many which are not clear points of brilliant light, but 

 are surrounded by a more or less extended bright haze, such as 

 would be given out by an atmosphere of nebular matter in a state 

 of progressive condensation. And he pointed to what are known 

 as " variable " stars, as affording evidence that the heavenly bodies 

 are not permanently what they seem to us at any one moment, 

 or within the limited period of our observation of them, but 

 are undergoing progressive changes, the several stages of which 

 are presented to us in the various bodies now visible in the firma- 

 ment, — just as the several stages of any one human life from 

 infancy to old age are presented by the members of a single 

 community. 



Now Laplace did not begin, like Herschel, with the stellar 

 universe ; but aimed to give a scientific account of the evolution 

 of the planetary system from the atmosphere of nebular matter, 

 which he, in accordance with Herschel's ideas, supposed to have 

 originally surrounded the sun ; and the train of reasoning by 

 which he Avorked this out on the lines I have already indicated, 

 was one of mechanical deduction from the Newtonian laws of 

 mutual attraction and motion. That these deductions were not 

 only in accordance with the ordinary conditions of the planetary 

 system, but were also applicable to the exceptional cases of the 

 ring of Saturn, and to the intervention of a multitude of asteroids, 

 in the place of a single planet, between Mars and Jupiter, seemed 

 to afford the same kind of confirmation to Laplace's theory, that 

 Herschel's had derived from the different degrees of condensation 

 observable among the celestial bodies. And the wide basis of 

 observation on which the nebular hypothesis of Herschel was 

 erected, commended it to the minds of many who viewed with 

 distrust the reasoning process by which Laplace deduced the 

 solar system from the supposed nebular atmosphere of the 

 sun. 



I have never been able to understand why this doctrine should 

 have been the subject of so much theological opposition. It was 

 said to have been framed by Laplace with the express purpose of 

 " doing away with the necessity for a Creator ; " but though others 

 may have used it (as many are now using the Darwinian doctrine) 

 as an instrument of attack on Theistic belief, there is no trace, ia 



