309 
true as facts or processes, and may do what they can. But “TheCar- 
the Evolutionists are at an immeasurable distance yet from ?y nt of crea- 
showing that they can do everything. It is entirely bad logic tlon ” 
to assume that they can do a bit more than we can prove. 
And, if we could prove them to be capable of doing even such 
inconceivable things as producing the general beauty of nature 
and starting generation, the theory ©f spontaneous cosmogony 
would still be nowhere, until we could prove for them that 
all the necessary forces started themselves and maintain them- 
selves, and all their powers of transformation, according to 
the ascertained laws of conservation of force. 
Therefore, whichever end we begin at in our reasoning, 
whether at Mr. Spencer's “ Unknowable and Persistent Force/' 
or the latest phenomena of the present world, we are equally 
landed in some confessedly “incomprehensible" process, or 
one for which no possible physical cause can be discovered or 
invented, or suggested in intelligible language with any ra- 
tional probability. What does that mean, except that the 
final cause or agent must be above physical, or supernatural, 
or, at any rate, what Newton called “immaterial" ? Indeed 
Mr. Spencer calls his Prime Cause an “immaterial Reality," 
which is practically the same thiug, bearing in mind that he 
will never use other people's phrases. Only he denies that 
his immaterial agent does anything except maintain inde- 
structible force and “work in us," whatever he means by 
that. Whether he means anything or nothing, both those 
phrases leave the problem of cosmogony as unexplained and 
as incomprehensible as if he had simply and dogmatically 
said, “The world made itself by persistent force, and that is 
all we know about it, and therefore there was, and is, and 
can be, no designing Creator." 
I promised to say a word before I finished about his nick- 
name of the “carpenter theory of creation" for ours, which 
is no doubt calculated to please those who do not want to see 
through its absurdity, or to remember that carpenters neither 
make nor alter the nature of their materials, and much less 
produce their results by making general laws for causing bits 
of wood to grow of themselves into chairs and tables, besides 
other very obvious differences below the notice of a synthetic 
unifier of all knowledge. And, if the nickname were as 
good as it is bad, it is only the Spencerian appropriation of 
the epithet “anthropomorphic," which had often been applied 
before by Materialists to the creative theory. To say nothing 
of its being wrong etymologically (for no theory imputes 
the form of man to Cod), it practically means this : Men 
