THE DOCTRINE OF PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT. 269 



been separately produced, and were immutable. We can 

 therefore imagine the consternation of English naturalists 

 generally at the publication, by an unknown writer, of an 

 attack so direct and so unanswerable upon this so 

 cherished doctrine. 



Of course, the writer of the 'Vestiges' was by many 

 held up to public obloquy as an obvious materialist, or 

 even as an atheist. It is, however, quite impossible for 

 any one to read the ' Vestiges ' with an unbiassed mind, 

 and not to recognise that the writer had discharged his 

 self-appointed task in a spirit at once genuinely reverential 

 and in the truest sense religious. On this point, it is 

 worth while to quote his own remarks. It has been urged, 

 he says, that ' to presume a creation of living beings as a 

 series of natural events, is equivalent to superseding the 

 whole doctrine of the divine authorship of organic nature. 

 With such a notion infesting the mind, it must of course 

 be almost hopeless that the question should be candidly 

 entertained. There can, in reality, be no reason adduced 

 for holding this as necessarily following from the idea of 

 organic creation in the manner of law, or by a natural 

 method, any more than from a similar view of inorganic 

 creation. The whole aim of science from the beginning 

 has been to ascertain law; one set of phenomena after 

 another has been brought under this conception, without 

 our ever feeling that God was less the adorable Creator of 

 his own world. It seems strange that a stand should 

 appear necessary at this particular point in the march of 

 science. Perhaps if our ordinary ideas respecting natural 

 law were more just, the difficulty might be lessened. It 

 cannot be sufficiently impressed that the whole idea 



