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Show 58 DARWINIAN A. while human thought is consecutive, Divine thought is simultaneous, embracing at the same time and forever, in the past, the present and the future, the most diversified relations among hundreds of thousands of organized beings, each of which may present complications again, which to study and understand even imperfectly-as for instance man himself-mankind has already spent thousands of years." 1 In thus conceiving of the Divine Power in act as coetaneous with Divine Thought, and of both as far as may be apart from the human element of time, our author may regard the intervention of the Creator either as, humanly . speaking, done from all time, or else as doilng throug!~ all time. In the ultimate analysis we suppose that every philosophical theist must adopt one or the other conception. A perversion of the first view leads toward atheism, the notion of an eternal sequence of cause and . effect, for which there is no first cause-a view which :few sane persons can long rest in. The danger which may threaten the second view is pantheism. We feel safe fram either error, in our profound conviction that there is order in ·the universe; that order presupposes mind ; design, will ; and mind or ·will, personality.' Thus guarded, we much prefer the second of the two conceptions of causation, as the more philosophical as well as Christian view-a view which leaves us with the same difficulties and the same mysteries inN ature as in Providence, and no other. Natural law, upon this view, is the human conception of continued and orderly Divine action. t Op. cit., p. 130. THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. We do not suppose that less power, or other power, is required to sustain the universe and carry on its operations, than to bring it into being. So, while conceiving no improbability of "interventions of Creative mind in N atnre," if by such is meant the bringing to pass of new and fittirig events at fitting times, we leave it for profounder minds to establish, if they c.an, a rational distinction in kind between his working in Nature carrying on operations, and in initiating those operations. We wished, under the light of such views·, to ex.:. amine more critically the doctrine of this book, especially of some questionable parts; for instance, its explanation of the natural development of organs, and its implication of a "necessary acquirement of mental power" in the ascending scale of gradation. But there is room only for the general declaration that we cannot think the Cosmos a series which began with chaos and ends with mind, or of which mind is a res~lt: that, if, by the successive origination of species and organs through natural agencies, the author means a series of events which succeed each e>ther irrespective of a continued· directing intelligenceevents which mind does not order and shape to destined ends-then he has not established that doctrine, nor advanced toward its establishment, but has accumulated improbabilities beyond all belief. Take the formation and the origination of the successive degrees of cQmplexity of eyes as a specimen. The treatment of this subject (pp. 188, 189), upon one interpretation, is open to all the objections referred to; but, if, on the other hand, we inay rightly compare the eye" to |