IV.] Dr. BiJcHNER ON Darwinism. 53 



menal manifestations of which the world is made up, 

 there is no miraculous break, no conjuring, no freak 

 of the magician. And to this conclusion all modern 

 scientific inquiry has long been leading us. It needed 

 no Dr. Buchner to tell us this. 



All this, however, cannot stir us one inch toward 

 the philosophic doctrine of which Dr. Buchner is the 

 advocate. Dr. Buchner shares with the theologians 

 whom he combats the error of supposing that god- 

 hood cannot be manifested in a regular series of phe- 

 nomena, but only in fortuitous miraculous surprises. 

 When he has proved that mankind was originated 

 through the ordinary processes of paternity from 

 some lower form of life, he thinks he has overturned 

 the belief in God, whereas he has really only over- 

 turned a crude and barbarous conception of the way 

 in which God acts. And so when it is shown that all 

 the phenomena of the world can be explained in 

 conformity to a doctrine of evolution which origin- 

 ated in the study of material phenomena, our author 

 thinks that the ground-theorem of materialism is 

 for ever established ; quite forgetting that what we 

 call material phenomena are, after all said and 

 done, nothing but expressions for certain changes 

 occurring in a complicated series of psychical 

 states. 



