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all its wondrous phenomena, from attraction to thinking and 
loving, depend simply on the collocations and motions or par- 
ticles, that are by themselves inert, and, compared with one 
another, are indistinguishable. As soon as this construction 
was accepted, the poetico-religious theory of development be- 
came only a stupid game of permutation and combination. 
The progress of the universe was as uninteresting and as unin- 
structive as the evolution of logarithmic indices that are never 
applied, and, what is worst of all, the system which derived all 
its plausibility and interest from the phenomena of life provided 
for its own refutation and abandonment by the suicide to which 
it was self-doomed. It teaches that the ultimate molecules or 
simplest forms of matter have not only the capacity for, but 
they are self-moved to, acts of combining into more complex 
unions, each of which is capable of phenomena higher in the 
scale of existence. When the highest forms of the inorganic 
pass, by insensible gradations, into the lowest forms of life, the 
higher forms of life begin to put on the lower forms of sentiency 
and intelligence. It follows by strict necessity that all the 
spirit of which we are cognizant — all finite spirit, is but some 
highly developed form of matter. It would seem that a uni- 
verse like this, with germs like these, endowed with such 
varied capacities of coaction and development, and certain to 
proceed with advancing steps through an ascending line of 
higher possibilities, must require as its supplement and expla- 
nation a plan — a thought implying a thinker. We have seen 
that the logic of the system must exclude even the thought, 
and makes no provision for the belief of such an agent. The 
contempt and scorn, however, with which this belief has been 
rejected by so many evolutionists can only be pardoned in view 
of the profound ignorance that teleological views have been held 
by some of the profoundest philosophers who have made the 
most valuable contributions to positive knowledge. It would 
seem also that, in proportion to the earnestness with which 
fact and experiment have been insisted on as the only verifi- 
cations of hypothesis, and the more distinctly mathematical 
determinations of law have been exacted, the more romantic 
and gratuitous has been the faith in forces wholly incapable of 
mathematical promulgation, to which experiments even of the 
most general character could not possibly be applied. As we 
follow out the system into other applications, we find that the 
theories of ethics and politics derived from it are as offensive 
as the materialism and atheism which it involves or supposes. 
Perhaps we may say that they are more immediately dangerous 
and offensive because they are capable of being more directly 
destructive in their consequences. And yet so generally has 
