Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/719

Rh every moment of that conscious intelligence which enables us to bear witness to them, we know they are works from which the essential relation of a given effect to its adequate cause is never absent. And for this reason, if we view the matter in pure accordance with experience, we are led to maintain that the antagonism or contrariety which seems to exist in Prof. Agassiz's mind between the action of God and the action of natural forces is nothing but a figment of that ancestral imagination from which the lessons which shaped Prof. Agassiz's ways of thinking were derived. So far as experience can tell us any thing, it tells us that divine action is the action of natural forces; for, if we refuse to accept this conclusion, what have we to do but retreat to the confession that we have no experience of divine action whatever, and that the works of God have been made manifest only to those who lived in that unknown time when Aladdin's palaces were built, and when species were created, in a single night, without the intervention of any natural process?

Trusting, then, in this universal teaching of experience, let us for a moment face fairly the problem which the existence of men upon the earth presents to us. Here is actually existing a group of organisms, which we call the human race. Either it has existed eternally, or some combination of circumstances has determined its coming into existence. The first alternative is maintained by no one, and our astronomical knowledge of the past career of our planet is sufficient decisively to exclude it. There is no doubt that at some time in the past the human race did not exist, and that its gradual or sudden coming into existence was determined by some combination of circumstances. Now, when Prof. Agassiz asks us to see, in this origination of mankind, the working of a Divine Power, we acquiesce in all reverence. But when he asks us to see in this origination of mankind the working of a Divine Power, instead of the working of natural causes, we do not acquiesce, because, so far as experience has taught us any thing, it has taught us that Divine Power never works except by the way of natural causation. Experience tells us that God causes Aladdin's palaces to come into existence gradually, through the cooperation of countless minute antecedents. And it tells us, most emphatically, that such structures do not come into existence without an adequate array of antecedents, no matter what the Arabian Nights may tell us to the contrary.

Now, when Prof. Agassiz asks us to believe that species have come into existence by means of a special creative fiat, and not through the operation of what are called natural causes, we reply that his request is mere inanity and nonsense. We have no reason to suppose that any creature like a man, or any other vertebrate, or articulate, or mollusk, ever came into existence by any other process than the familar process of physical generation. To ask us to believe in any other process is to ask us to abandon the experience which we have