288 



EXPLICATIONS. 



less easily replied to. It has appeared to various critics 

 particularly to the writer in the Edinburgh Review, that 

 very sacred principles are threatened by a doctrine of uni- 

 versal law. A natural origin of life, and a natural basis 

 in organization for the operations of the human mind, 

 speak to them of fatalism and materialism. And, strange 

 to say, those w T ho every day give views of physical cos- 

 mogony altogether discrepent in appearance with that of 

 Moses, apply hard names to my book for suggesting an 

 organic cosmogony in the same way liable to inconsid- 

 erante odium. I must firmly protest against this mode 

 of meeting speculations regarding nature. The object of 

 my book, whatever may be said of the manner in which 

 it is treated, is purely scientific. The views which I 

 give of this history of organization stand exactly on 

 the same ground upon which the geological doctrines 

 stood fifty years ago. I am merely endeavoring to read 

 aright another chapter of the mystic book which God has 

 placed under the attention of his creatures. A little lib- 

 erality of judgment would enable even an opponent of 

 my particular hypothesis to see that questions as to 

 reverence and irreverence, piety and impiety, are prac- 

 tically determined very much by special impressions upon 

 particular minds. He would see, for example, that the 

 idea of attaching irreverence to a doctrine of natural law 

 is only likely to arise in a mind which has been trained 

 oy habit to regard the divine working as more special 

 in its nature — precisely as, finding the Edinburgh re- 

 viewer speaking of the whole works of the Deity as " vul- 

 gar nature " (p. 53,) I feel that the impiety which such 

 an idea expresses to my sense is only impiety to me, who 

 cannot separate nature from God himself, but it is not 

 necessarily so to him, whose education has given him 

 peculiar, and as I think erroneous conceptions on this 

 subject. The absence, however, of all liberality on these 

 points in my reviewers is striking, and especially so in 

 those whose geological doctrines have exposed them to 

 similar misconstructions. If the men newly emerged 

 from the odium which was thrown upon Newton** theory 

 of the planetary motions had rushed forward to turn that 

 odium upon the patrons of the dawning science of geology, 

 they would have been prefiguring the conduct of several 

 of my critics, themselves hardly escaped from the rude 

 laands of the narrow-minded, yet eager to jctin that rabble 



