CORRESPONDENCE, 1840-55. 229 



I have always held that when the phrase * there is a good 

 deal to be said on both sides ' applies, it means that we do not 

 know much about the matter. Your book is a converse instance ; 

 that when we do not know much about the matter there is 

 always a good deal to be said on both sides. Not that I mean 

 to give up the poor dear lungless lunarians, or the jovial cinder- 

 sifters, altogether, quite yet. I admit the argument from time 

 to space ; but, granting that the human world is only d t out of 

 t of the whole of time existence, we may grant it to be d s out of 

 s, of space existence ; and all the stars and planets may be in 

 their several progresses from oo to +00, and every one at a 

 different part of it, with at least the chance of two given ones 

 being within m of each other, only ra =00 ( oo). And this 

 on the supposition that there is but one kind of progression ; it 

 being more likely, however, that this progression is infinitely 

 varied in space, so that, instead of diminishing the immensity 

 of creation as usually taken namely, for one time, the idea of 

 one mode of existence infinitely varied in space, you have made 

 prominent a system of triple entry, time, space, law of pro- 

 gression. 



I find in your book the germ, or more, of a notion which I 

 have had for twenty years and which may have occurred to 

 many others, and probably has. I have been laughing all that 

 time in the sleeve at the clergy, for not seeing that the infidel 

 geology, as they call it, is in truth the most unanswerable proof 

 of su/pernaturalism that ever was propounded. Between an un- 

 intelligibly self-existent Creator, and an unintelligibly self- 

 existent order of things self-reproductive natura rerum, my 

 reason never saw a priori choice ; not having the slightest idea 

 which of two wholly inconceivable things was most conceivable. 

 But the straightforward impossibility of human existence at 

 some calculable time brings us to the alternative of an absolute 

 creation or the growth of some lizards or fishes into men 

 through various stages. I do not read controversies about the 

 pros and cons, of the Book of Genesis, and this argument may for 

 aught I know be common ; but it never oozed into any conversa- 

 tion in my hearing, though I have frequently looked out for it 

 when I heard the orthodox and the heterodox fighting about the 

 matter. 



Yours very truly, 



A. DE MORGAN. 



