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Inasmuch as He has endowed the phenomenal world with being, it is impossible for that world to become nonbeing, for it is the very genesis of God; it is in the realm of origination; it is a creational and not a subjective world, and the bounty descending upon it is continuous and permanent.
Assuredly this is an absolute impossibility, for when we study the creational world, we see that the difference of degree is a barrier to such knowing. An inferior degree can never comprehend a higher degree or kingdom. The mineral, no matter how far it may advance, can never attain knowledge of the vegetable.
And besides that, I could by no means see what the explanation explained. Neither did it help me to be told by an eminent anatomist that species had succeeded one another in time, in virtue of "a continuously operative creational law."
The Edinburgh reviewer, on the contrary, scouts all such objections, as well he may, since he records his belief in "a continuous creative operation," "a constantly operating secondary creational law," through which species are successively produced; and he emits faint, but not indistinct, glimmerings of a transmutation theory of his own; so that he is equally exposed to all the philosophical objections advanced by Agassiz, and to most of those urged by the other American critics, against Darwin himself.
V. of "Transactions of the Zoölogical Society," he says, "that natural evolution, through secondary causes, by means of slow physical and organic operations through long ages, is not the less clearly recognizable as the act of all-adaptive Mind, because we have abandoned the old error of supposing it the result of a primary, direct and sudden act of creational construction.... The succession of species by continuously operating law is not necessarily a 'blind operation. Such law, however designed in the properties and successions of natural objects, intimates, nevertheless, a preconceived progress.
If we confound "Variation" or "Natural Selection" with such creational laws, we deify secondary causes or immeasurably exaggerate their influence. All our advances in the knowledge of Nature have consisted of such steps as these, and we must not be discouraged because greater mysteries remain behind wholly inscrutable to us.
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