DEVELOPMENT OF THE CREATOR. 69 
’ sification of animal and vegetable species must of necessity 
have gradually increased in the course of the organic history 
of the earth, and could only attain its highest perfection in 
most recent times. 
The above-mentioned laws of development, together with 
some other general ones, which have been expressly admitted 
and justly emphasized by Agassiz, and some of which have 
first been set forth by him, are, as we shall see later, only 
explicable by the Theory of Descent, and without it remain 
perfectly incomprehensible. The conjoint action of In- 
heritance and Adaptation, as explained by Darwin, can 
alone be their true cause, But they all stand in sharp and 
irreconcilable opposition to the hypothesis of creation main- 
tained by Agassiz, as well as to the idea of a personal 
Creator who acts for a definite purpose. If we seriously 
wish to explain those remarkable phenomena and _ their 
inter-connection by Agassiz’s theory, then we are necessarily 
driven to the curious supposition that the Creator himself 
has developed, together with the organic nature which he 
created and modelled. We can, in that case, no longer rid 
ourselves of the idea that the Creator himself, like a human 
being, designed, improved, and finally, with many altera- 
tions, carried out his plans. “Man grows as higher grow 
his aims,” and the same supposition, so unworthy of a God, 
must be applied to him. Although, from the reverence 
with which, in every page, Agassiz speaks of the Creator, 
it might appear that, on his theory, we attain to the 
sublimest conception of the divine activity in nature, yet 
the contrary is in truth the case. The divine Creator is 
degraded to the level of an idealized man, of an organism 
progressing in development! 
