Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/718

700 the outset by means of some act of which our ordinary notions of cause and effect can give no account whatever. For every one of the individuals of which a species is made up, lie will admit the adequacy of the ordinary process of generation; but for the species as a whole, this process seems to him inadequate, and he flies at once to that refuge of inconsequent and timid minds—miracle!

This is really just what Prof. Agassiz's theory of the origin of specific forms amounts to, and this is the reason why, in spite of grave heresy on minor points, he is now regarded by the evangelical Church as one of its chief champions. Instead of the natural process of generation—which is the only process by which we have ever known organic beings to be produced—he would fain set up some unknown mysterious process, the nature of which he is careful not to define, but for which he endeavors to persuade us that we have a fair equivalent in sonorous phrases concerning "creative will," "free action of an intelligent mind," and so on. In thus postponing considerations of pure science to considerations of "natural theology," I have no doubt Prof. Agassiz is actuated by a praiseworthy desire to do something for the glory of that Power of which the phenomenal universe is the perpetual but ever-changing manifestation. But how futile is such an attempt as this! How contrary to common-sense it is to say that a species is produced, not by the action of blind natural forces, but by an intelligent will! For, although this most prominent of all facts seems to be oftenest overlooked by theologians and others whom it most especially concerns, we are all the time, day by day and year by year, in each and every event of our lives, having experience of the workings of that Divine Power which, whether we attribute to it "intelligent will" or not, is unquestionably the one active agent in all the dynamic phenomena of Nature. Little as we know of the intrinsic nature of this Omnipresent Power, which, in our poor human talk, we call God, we do at least know, by daily and hourly experience, what is the character of its working. The whole experience of our lives teaches us that this Power works after a method which, in our scholastic expression, we call the method of cause and effect, or the method of natural law. Traditions of a barbarous and uncultivated age, in which mere grotesque associations of thoughts were mistaken for facts, have told us that this Power has, at various times in the past, worked in a different way—causing effects to appear without cognizable antecedents, even as Aladdin's palace rose in all its wondrous magnificence, without sound of carpenter's hammer or mason's chisel, in a single night. But about such modes of divine action we know nothing whatever from experience; and the awakening of literary criticism, in modern times, has taught us to distrust all such accounts of divine action which conflict with the lessons we learn from what is ever going on round about us. So far as we know aught concerning the works of God, which are being performed in us, through us, and around us, during