412 NATURE AND MAN. 



matter ; while of the force itself it gives no account whatever. We 

 recognize it by our own consciousness of effort in lifting a weight 

 from the ground ; and this recognition carries us from the sphere 

 of physical into that of moral causation. For, as Sir John 

 Herschel long ago pointed out, our consciousness of direct 

 personal causation in the performance of a voluntary act, leads us 

 to regard what we call the '* Forces of Nature " as the emanations 

 of an all-pervading will, and those uniformities in their action 

 which we term her " laws " as the manifestations of its un- 

 changing continuity. As Dr. Martineau has admirably expressed 

 it, " In whatever sense, and on whatever grounds, we affirm the 

 " tenancy of our own frame by the soul that governs it, must we 

 " fill the universe with the ever-living Spirit of whose thought it is 

 " the development." The very conception of evolution involves 

 a beginning ; and for that beginning, which de facto excludes all 

 antecedent physical agency (otherwise it would not be a real 

 beginning), none but a moral cause can be assigned. And thus 

 the continuous uniformity in the evolutionary process, which some 

 have regarded as explained by the laws that merely express it, 

 really testifies to the perfection of the original design, the pro- 

 gressive unfolding of which has never needed a departure from it. 

 I have never met with a valid reason for regarding the relation 

 of the evolution-doctrine to the organic world, as in any respect 

 different from that in which it stands to the physical universe. 

 All the elders among us were brought up in that anthropomorphic 

 conception of " special creations," which seemed natural to the 

 childhood of our race, just as it does to the child-mind of the 

 present day. And to the older geologists, who regarded the 

 successive geological " periods " as marked off, one from another, 

 by cataclysmic interruptions that involved the destruction of all 

 the existing races of plants and animals, a similar introduction of 

 fresh forms, to re-people the newly modelled globe after each 

 cataclysm, seemed quite as conceivable as the original creation. 

 But all geological and palseontological inquiry has of late so 

 decidedly tended towards the substitution of the idea of slow 

 continuous change for that of violent convulsionary disturbances, 

 that when Mr. Darwin showed that a doctrine of continuous 

 " descent with modification " might be built upon a really scien- 



