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laws, which are in like manner the expression of his Will?. . . The fact of the cosmical arrangements being an effect of natural law, is a powerful argument for the organic arrangements being so likewise; for how can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds into form by the simple establishment of a natural principle flowing from his mind, was to interfere personally whenever a new shell-fish or reptile was to be introduced in one of these worlds? Surely this idea is too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained. This would certainly be to take a very mean view of the Creative Power—in short to anthropomorphize it.

In his "Explanations," 1846, he puts the considerations urged by Romanes far more tellingly than Romanes put them forty years later. Chambers wrote:

Huxley, it is true, seems in his pre-Darwinian period to have disapproved of this type of argument; creation being "perfectly conceivable. . . the so-called a priori arguments against the possibility of creative acts" appeared to him "to be devoid of reasonable foundation." This, of course, was a perverse misapprehension of the issue. It was not a question of conceivability, but of the relative probability of the only two available hypotheses. And the first criterion of probability in such a case must be the agreeement of any proposed hypothesis with the general type of hypothetical explanations which the whole previous experience of men of science has found to be capable of fruitful application, and of the sort of verification which comes through fruitful application. By such a criterion, no hesitation between the two hypotheses was admissible. "Special acts of creative volition" had never been found by science to be a vera causa at all; the hypothesis was vague, sterile, impossible of verification, contrary to all the principles of method by the use of which the past successes of science had been achieved; "gradual development through natural descent" was, as a