28 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
which runs through it, and which contrasts favourably 
with the confused mythology of creation current among 
most of the other ancient nations. First the Lord God 
creates the earth as an inorganic body; then he separates 
light from darkness, then water from the dry land. Now 
the earth has become inhabitable for organisms, and plants 
are first created, animals later—and among the latter the 
inhabitants of the water and the air first, afterwards the 
inhabitants of the dry land. Finally God creates man, the 
last of all organisms, in his own image, and as the ruler of 
the earth. 
Two great and fundamental ideas, common also to the 
non-miraculous theory of development, meet us in this 
Mosaic hypothesis of creation, with surprising clearness and 
simplicity—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the 
idea of progressive development or perfecting. Although 
Moses looks upon the results of the great laws of organic 
development (which we shall later point out as the necessary 
conclusions of the Doctrine of Descent) as the direct actions 
of a constructing Creator, yet in his theory there lies hidden 
the ruling idea of a progressive development and a differen- 
tiation of the originally simple matter. We can therefore 
bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish 
lawgiver’s grand insight into nature, and his simple and 
natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a 
so-called “ divine revelation.” That it cannot be such is clear 
from the fact that two great fundamental errors are asserted 
in it, namely, first, the geocentric error that the earth is the 
fixed central point of the whole universe, round which the: 
sun, moon, and stars move; and secondly, the anthropocentric 
error, that man is the premeditated aim of the creation of 
