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Updated: April 30, 2025
If, however, they are requested to prove the authenticity of these oracles, which are at such variance with each other, they will refer to miracles in support of what they assert: these miracles, independent of the difficulty there must exist to repose in them our faith, when, as we have seen, they are admitted even by the theologians themselves, to be contrary to the intelligence, the immutability, to the omnipotency of their immaterial substances, are, moreover, warmly disputed by each particular sect, as being impositions, practised by the others for their own individual advantage.
How, then, having posited immutability alone, shall we make change come forth from it? Not by the addition of anything, for, by the hypothesis, there exists nothing positive outside Ideas. It must therefore be by a diminution.
Socrates learned his philosophy from no one, and struck out an entirely new path. He declared his own ignorance, and sought to convince other people of theirs. He did not seek to reveal truth so much as to expose error. And yet it was his object to attain correct ideas as to moral obligations. He proclaimed the sovereignty of virtue and the immutability of justice.
Really it is nothing of the kind, but infinitely more. It is tireless energy, yearning, force, profusion, terror, immutability in variety. What are words to such a power? It is to that I stretch out my arms. I must lie folded in that immensity, drown and sink in it, till it and I are one. I must be resumed into the divine energy whose appearance is but a broken hint of it.
Seriously, there must be something wrong in the position, some baleful error mixed with the truth, to which this contradiction of our inmost convictions may be attributed. The error, as we suppose, lies in the combination of the principle of design with the hypothesis of the immutability and isolated creation of species.
"If you mean to take the immutability of the human affections as a basis of argument, I have done." "There your cynicism comes in," said the other, "and denies you the pleasure and profit of contemplating an ideal, and of following it up to its full development." "Is it cynical to see things as they are instead of as they might be in an imaginary world?"
Thus in gathering his seeds, the child will select only the largest and best and take them from only the best plants to put in his garden the next year, at the same time planting beautiful truths in the garden of his soul. Not the least of these truths is a profound sense of the immutability of law.
There is no other means by which any heart can be made immovable, except in so far as it may be moved by holy impulses and sweet drawings of love and loftinesses of aspiration towards God; there is no other means by which a heart, with all its inward perturbations and all its outward sources of agitation, can be made calm and still, except by living, deep, continual fellowship with Him who is the Eternal Calm, and from whose stable Being we mutable men can derive serenity which is a faint likeness of His immutability.
We see this in the fact that the most eminent palaeontologists, namely, Cuvier, Agassiz, Barrande, Pictet, Falconer, E. Forbes, etc., and all our greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, etc., have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species.
Men have built systems of philosophy around their conception of anthropomorphic deities; they have linked to these systems of philosophy the allied conception of the immutability of man's spirit, and they have asked that scientific progress should stop short at the brink of these systems of philosophy and accept their dictates as final.
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