COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



sands and its herbage, and at the next succeed- 

 ing moment we have in the foreground an ox 

 or a man, or, according to another view, a herd 

 of oxen and a group of men, and all this with- 

 out any assignable group of physical anteced- 

 ents intervening ! He who can believe that St. 

 Goar, of Treves, transformed a sunbeam into a 

 hat-peg, or that men were once changed into 

 werewolves by putting on an enchanted gir- 

 dle, or that Joshua and Cardinal Ximenes con- 

 strained the earth to pause in its rotation, will 

 probably find no difficulty in accepting such a 

 hypothesis to account for the origin of men and 

 oxen. To persons in such a stage of culture it 

 is no obstacle to any hypothesis that it involves 

 an assumption as to divine interposition which 

 is incapable of scientific investigation and un- 

 interpretable in terms of human experience. It 

 can hardly be denied, however, that any hy- 

 pothesis which involves such an assumption is 

 at once excluded from the pale of science and 

 relegated to the regions of mythology, where 

 it may continue to satisfy those to whom mytho- 

 logic interpretations of natural phenomena still 

 seem admissible, but can hardly be deemed of 

 much account by the scientific inquirer. 



On the other hand, according to the doctrine 

 of derivation, the more complex plants and ani- 

 mals are the slowly modified descendants of 

 less complex plants and animals, and these in 

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