420 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 



as being a primitive belief and as being a belief belonging to 

 an almost-extinct family, is a belief not countenanced by a 

 single fact. No one ever saw a special creation; no one 

 ever found proof of an indirect kind that a special creation 

 had taken place. It is significant, as Dr. Hooker remarks, 

 that naturalists who suppose new species to be miraculously 

 originated, habitually suppose the origination to occur in 

 some region remote from human observation. Wherever the 

 order of organic nature is exposed to the view of zoologists 

 and botanists, it expels this conception; and the conception 

 survives only in connexion with imagined places, where the 

 order of organic nature is unknown. 



Besides being absolutely without evidence to give it exter- 

 nal support, this hypothesis of special creations cannot sup- 

 port itself internally — cannot be framed into a coherent 

 thought. It is one of those illegitimate symbolic concep- 

 tions which are mistaken for legitimate symbolic concep- 

 tions {First Principles, § 9), because they remain untested. 

 Immediately an attempt is made to elaborate the idea into 

 anything like a definite shape, it proves to be a pseud-idea, 

 admitting of no definite shape. Is it supposed that a new 

 organism, when specially created, is created out of nothing? 

 If so, there is a supposed creation of matter; and the crea- 

 tion of matter is inconceivable — implies the establishment of 

 a relation in thought between nothing and something — a 

 relation of which one term is absent — an impossible rela- 

 tion. Is it supposed that the matter of which the new or- 

 ganism consists is not created for the occasion, but is taken 

 out of its pre-existing forms and arranged into a new form? 

 If so, we are met by the question — how is the re-arrangement 

 effected? Of the m)Tiad atoms going to the composition of 

 the new organism, all of them previously dispersed through 

 the neighbouring air and earth, does each, suddenly disen- 

 gaging itself from its combinations, rush to meet the -rest, 

 unite with them into the appropriate chemical compounds, 

 and then fall with certain others into its appointed place in 



