33« 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 



ri^lit while all the rest is wrong, he is unable to say* May 

 we not then expect, that the relinquishment of all other 

 parts of this story, will bye and bye be followed by the 

 i-ehnquishment of this remaining part of it ? 



§ 112. The belief which we find thus questionable, both 

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

 an almost-extinct family, is a belief that is 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 phenomena 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, so continually mistaken for legitimate symboKc 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 aefinite 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 

 80, we are met by the question — ^how is the re-arrangement 



