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alike of the fortuitous concourse of atoms ? Eather let us con- 
fess an ineffable mystery^ than thus darken counsel by words 
without knowledg*e ! 
The notion of a self-transforming power, which becomes of 
itself at each upward movement more than itself, is no solution 
of the riddle of the world. Each successive change requires a 
cause. Under the term development we only conceal the 
diflSculty, for that which is developed must have pre-existed 
potentially in the germ. Out of matter we can get nothing 
which hypothesis has not first put into it ; and, if mind be 
the outcome and effect, nothing less than mind will suffice as 
the cause and origin. It may be argued that the creative 
ascent to man is by an infinite gradation extending downwards 
and backwards into past Time through aeons of lower exist- 
ence. But this does not diminish the requisite creative power. 
It is not as in mechanics, where the smallest force, with time 
to work in, may suffice to the mightiest tasks. For it is here a 
question, not of quantity, but of quality. ^^In not a few of the 
progressionists,"’^ says an authority already quoted, ^‘'the weak 
illusion is unmistakable, that, with time enough, you may get 
everything out of next to nothing. Grant us, — they seem to 
say, — any tiniest granule of power, so close upon zero that it is 
not worth begrudging ; allow it some triffing tendency to infini- 
tesimal increment ; and we will show you how this little stock 
became the Kosmos without ever taking a step worth thinking 
of, much less constituting, a case for design. The argument is a 
mere appeal to an incompetency in the human imagination, in 
virtue of which magnitudes evading conception are treated as 
out of existence, and an aggregate of inappreciable increments 
is simultaneously equated, — in its cause to nothing, in its effect 
to the ivhole of things. You manifestly want the same causality, 
whether concentrated on a moment, or distributed through in- 
calculable ages ; only, in drawing upon it, a logical theft is more 
easily committed piecemeal than wholesale. Surely it is a mean 
device for a philosopher thus to crib causation by hair-breadths, 
to put it out at compound interest through all time, and then 
disown the debt. And it is vain after all ; for, dilute the in- 
tensity and change the form as you will of the power that has 
issued the universe, it remains, except to your subjective 
illusion, nothing less than infinite and nothing lower than 
divine.^^ 
Fairly viewed, the facts import that at every step in the 
ascent there has been a fresh infiux of power, a gradual 
imparting of new qualities. We may grant to the physicists 
that the stock of mere physical force has been a constant 
quantity. But it is rational to hold that its persistence has 
