60 
themselves, and find that, close as it is, no animal ever misses 
its true development, or grows to anything but what it was 
meant to be, we are forced to admit that the gradations 
which unquestionably unite all animals is an intellectual, not 
a material one. As the works of a human intellect are 
bound together by mental kinship, so are the thoughts of 
the Creator spiritually united.”* These are very different 
ideas, indeed, from those of Darwin. Even as to the process 
of development, their ideas are wide apart. Agassiz says, 
that however the processes of development “ may approach 
or even cross each other, they never end in making any 
living being different from the one which gave it birth, 
though in reaching that point it may pass through phases 
resembling other animals.”! — “ So-called varieties or breeds,” 
he says, far from indicating the beginning of new types, or 
the initiating of new species, only point out the range of 
flexibility in types, which in their essence are invariable.” J 
It will be readily seen, from the quotations thus before us, 
that the ideas of Agassiz are utterly irreconcileable with those 
of Darwin. The latter sees the evolution of all nature's variety 
from atoms, or gemmules thrown off by atoms, which find 
their own way to their respective places in organic substances 
through those (< several powers ” that were breathed into the 
few original forms, or into the one original, at the beginning 
of life. He imagines material being to be self-moving — self- 
organizing — though not quite self-creating. Agassiz sees all 
matter only plastic in the power of an omnipresent, ever- 
working mind. To Darwin, matter is force ; to Agassiz, mind 
alone is force. It is not that the two naturalists believe in the 
same power doing the same work, only that they differ as to 
the way in which it is done. “ Powers,” in Darwin's mind are 
those of material substance ; in the view of Agassiz, they are 
those of spiritual substance. “ Evolution,” on the theory of 
Darwin, must appear the grossest absurdity to Agassiz, as it 
may well do to any one who looks into the real principles of 
life as a true philosophy reveals them. 
Darwin sees no definite idea — indeed, no idea whatever — in 
the working out of the great natural processes. Variation 
with him is a matter of the purest chance, giving permanent 
existence to certain forms only because these happen to be 
the most suited to the conditions amid which the merest 
accident throws them ! Agassiz sees a thinking mind, with 
a clear plan from the first, working out that plan steadily 
through all the history of being. He seems to have no more 
* Travels in Brazil, pp. 22, 23. 
t Ibid. p. 41. 
I Ibid. p. 42. 
