344 TIIE EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 



finding tiieir way into the linnian body. In short, elaborate 

 contrivances were combined to insure the continuance of 

 their respective races ; and to make it impossible for the suc- 

 cessive generations of men to avoid being preyed upon by 

 them. What shall we say to this arrangement ? Shall we 

 say that man, " the head and crown of things," was provided 

 as a habitat for these parasites ? Or shall we say that these 

 degraded creatures, incapable of thought or enjoyment, were 

 created that they might cause unhappiness to man? One 

 or other of these alternatives must be chosen by those who 

 contend that every kind of organism was separately devised 

 by the Creator. Which do they prefer ? With the concep- 

 tion of two antagonistic powers, which severally <vork good 

 and evil in the world, the facts are congruous enough. But 

 with the conception of a supreme beneficence, this gratuitous 

 infliction of misery on man, in common with all other terres 

 trial creatures capable of feeling, is absolutely incompatible. 



§ 115. See then the results of our examination. The 

 belief in special creations of organisms, is a belief that arose 

 among men during the era of profoundest darkness ; and it 

 belongs to a family of beliefs which have nearly all died out 

 as enlightenment has increased. It is without a solitary 

 established fact on which to stand ; and when the attempt is 

 made to put it into definite shape in the mind, it turns out to 

 be only a pseud-idea. This mere verbal hypothesis, which 

 men idly accept as a real or thinkable hypothesis, is of the 

 same nature as would be one, based on a day's observation of 

 human life, that each man and woman was specially created 

 — an hypothesis not suggested by evidence, but by lack of 

 evidence — an hypothesis which formulates absolute ignorance 

 into a semblance of positive knowledge. Further, we see that 

 this hypothesis, wholly without support, essentially inconceiv- 

 able, and thus failing to satisfy men's intellectual need of an 

 interpretation, fails also to satisfy their moral sentiment. 

 It is quite inconsistent with those conceptions of the divino 



