442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in 

 Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that he 

 " substituted gravitation for Providence." But, more than this, 

 these men gave a new basis for the theory of evolution as distin- 

 guished from the theory of creation. 



Especially worthy of note is it that the great work of Descartes, 

 erroneous as many of its deductions were, and, in view of the lack 

 of physical knowledge in his time, must be, had done much to 

 weaken the old conception. His theory of a universe brought out 

 of all-pervading matter, wrought into orderly arrangement by 

 movements in accordance with physical laws though it was but 

 a provisional hypothesis had done much to draw men's minds 

 from the old theological view of creation ; it was an example of 

 intellectual honesty arriving at errors, but thereby aiding the ad- 

 vent of truths. Crippled though Descartes was by his almost 

 morbid fear of the Church, this part of his work was no small 

 factor in bringing in that attitude of mind which led to a recep- 

 tion of the thoughts of more unfettered thinkers. 



Thirty years later came, in England, an effort of a different 

 sort, but with a similar result. In 1678 Ralph Cud worth pub- 

 lished his Intellectual System of the Universe. To this day he 

 remains, in breadth of scholarship, in strength of thought, in tol- 

 erance, and in honesty, one of the greatest glories of the English 

 Church, and his work was worthy of him. He purposed to build 

 a fortress which should protect Christianity against all dangerous 

 theories of the universe, ancient or modern. The foundations of 

 the structure were laid with old thoughts thrown often into new 

 and striking forms; but, as the superstructure arose more and 

 more into view, while genius marked every part of it, features 

 appeared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious misgivings. 

 From the old theories of direct personal action on the universe by 

 the Almighty he broke utterly. He dwelt on the action of law, 

 rejected the continuous exercise of miraculous intervention, point- 

 ed out the fact that in the natural world there are " errors " and 

 "bungles," and argued vigorously in favor of the origin -and main- 

 tenance of the universe as a slow and gradual development of 

 Nature in obedience to an inward principle. The Balaks of 

 seventeenth-century orthodoxy might well condemn this honest 

 Balaam. 



Toward the end of the next century a still more profound 

 genius, Immanuel Kant, took up the theory, and in the light of 

 Newton's great utterances gave it a consistency which it had 

 never before had ; and about the same time Laplace gave it yet 

 greater strength by mathematical reasonings of wonderful power 

 and extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea 

 that our own solar system and others, suns, planets, satellites, and 



