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intellectual as well as of his physical nature. It must also 
(and that not by mere guesses or unsupported assertions, or by 
the introduction of a few proofs from existing nature and 
natural phenomena out of the countless varieties of phenomena 
to which the nature of man is intimately related) give an 
adequate account of the means by which he has been placed 
in harmony with his surroundings. For example, it must 
show, not in a few isolated instances, but in all, how it comes 
to pass that the earth and the air which surround it (man’s 
dwelling-place in fact), are adapted to his bodily organs, so as 
to produce the sensations on which his comfort, pleasure, and 
well-being depend ; and that too in such a way as to satisfy 
his higher intellectual capacity of receiving pleasure or a sense 
of enjoyment from his perceptions of beauty, grace, and har- 
mony. Truth as such should be predominant over every other 
consideration; but it has been the habit in some of the 
philosophy of the present day to identify a clever hypothesis, 
supported on some exhibition of facts, with the truth of the 
hypothesis, however great the antecedent improbabilities of its 
correctness may be. 
As I shall not have occasion to refer in the sequel to 
Darwin’s Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, I may 
give these as an illustration. With regard to the former 
work, of which I desire to speak with the utmost respect 
and to separate by a long interval from the latter. Professor 
Nicholson’s conclusions, which seem to have been formed from 
a very careful consideration of the subject in some of its 
branches, seem to show that Darwin’s theories are of very 
limited application, and that they scarcely need any considera- 
tion whatever in a religious discussion. With regard to the 
Iattei’, the Descent of Man, undoubtedly many valuable facts 
have been collected relating to the continuity of structure 
of the mammals, and to the habits and instincts of the inferior 
animals as compared with man ; but with regard to its con- 
clusions, which derive man’s descent from the ascidian, and 
more recently from the ape, I, for my part, consider them as 
an example of the imperfect kind of use of the inductive 
philosophy, which is so frequent in the present day. The 
student of natural philosophy is, in my opinion, quite justified, 
on philosophical grounds, in declining to accept the ancestry 
here offered to him, and to rejoice still in the assurance that he 
was made after the moral image of his Creator, who breathed 
into his nostrils the breath of life. 
I am of opinion that it was a bad day for science (not for 
science properly so called, but for the popular development of 
