I88 5 .] 
Analyses oj Books . 293 
Mr. Spencer’s objections to the hypothesis of Special Creation, 
as here summarised, are : the improbability of that idea being 
true as a consequence of the very fadt of its earliness. We know 
that the traditional conceptions of pristine man concerning 
earth, air, and sea, and all that is therein, were false — absurdly 
false. There is, therefore, a strong antecedent probability that 
the hypothesis of Special Creation, formulated at the same time, 
must be of the same character. 
Mr. Spencer’s second objection is a development of the first. 
“ The Special Creation hypothesis belongs not only to an order 
of mistaken and decaying beliefs, but to a special genus of that 
order.” It is one of the cases where primitive man interprets 
nature in terms of his own consciousness. For him “ there is 
no law of nature to be fulfilled or violated ; no physical sequence 
to be maintained or set aside ; and consequently there can be no 
such thing as miracle, or as what we profanely term ‘ Divine 
interference.' ” The author rightly pronounces it strange and 
inconsistent that “ the dogma of Special Creation is retained by 
men who would smile at the similar dogma of the dependence of 
sunrise on a diredt adl of volition.” 
The third objedtion is the utter absence of the slightest 
approach to evidence in favour of Special Creation. No one has 
seen an animal or a plant originating in any way save by propa- 
gation of its like. Some persons affedt to disbelieve evolution 
because they have never seen an ape develop into a man, or a 
man revert to an ape, — changes, by the way, which Evolution 
in nowise supposes or requires. But how much the more, then, 
should they rejedt Special Creation ! 
The fourth difficulty, as Miss Naden well remarks, renders all 
other arguments superfluous. All savants, all thinkers must 
agree that a working hypothesis must be thinkable and intel- 
ligible. But the Special Creation hypothesis is not thinkable. 
It introduces a mode of adtion “ which does not resemble any 
mode of adtion with which we are acquainted ; which is not a 
vera causa.” Are we to suppose animals condensing out of the 
air or the water, or sprouting up out of the earth ? We may 
here note how much of the so-called Scriptural objedtion to the 
Evolutionist hypothesis is due not to the Mosaic record, but to 
the glosses of the artists and the poets. A heavy responsibility 
in this respedt rests upon John Milton. We can scarcely help 
thinking that our modern conceptions of the origin of the animal 
world would have been clearer and more rational if the “ Paradise 
Lost ” had never been written. 
Mr. Spencer’s fifth argument is from analogy. Taking up 
Paley’s illustration of the watch picked up on a heath, from which 
the finder is supposed to infer the existence of a watchmaker, he 
replies : yes, “ but if we found a bird we should infer that it had 
been hatched; if we picked up a baby, that it had been born. . . 
Now an organic species evidently presents greater affinity with 
