Mere matter might lead us no further than an elementary mechanism, soulless and discretionless, like the first cause of Schelling, or the inflexible and arbitrary germinative principle of La Place. But mind, in its multiform and flexible adaptations to life,-mind, conscious of its own independent volitions, leads us above the prison-house wherein residest a Deity in chains. free Creator. "He that made the eye, can He not see?" He that made the mind, is He mindless?

Mind, voluntary, free-acting, involves a

CHAPTER III.

FROM THE EXISTENCE OF LAW IN THE UNIVERSE.

§ 32. THIS topic will be considered under the following heads

:

a. UNITY AND HARMONY OF PATTERN.

Here we find a singular evidence of the unity of the Divine Machinist. The trade-mark, if we may use the expression, is always the same. "I know such a pattern," declares the expert who is examined before a committee of the House of Commons, as to the extent to which certain goods have penetrated in distant territories, "and the mo ment I saw it, though in central Africa, I recognized in it the stamp used by our firm in Manchester for a particular style of goods." So in traversing the regions divided by one of our trunk railways, as we observe the line of stationhouses erected by the company, we say, "these we know at once the castellated walls, or the old English roofs, show where the management of a particular road begins and ends." So we trace back one style of architecture to one period, and another style to another period. So in a particular combination of color with effect, we discover one old master of painting; in another combination, another old

master.

Now if this is the case among the changing fashions of human society, how much more must it be so when this similarity of patterns runs over hundreds of thousands of years in time, and the whole universe in space. Forever, everywhere, as far as we can observe, are the same patterns applied, the same fundamental principles of structure observed. We pierce the pyramids, and discover in the funereal recesses of those vast mausoleums, urns of a certain shape, with hieroglyphics, marking a specific dynasty of the Pharaohs. We discover similar memorials going back to a similar period on the Upper Nile, and we at once infer a common origin. We infer, in like manner, the existence and unity of a now extinct race of civilized Americans, from the sacrificial mounds scattered over North America. And thus when we find primal types, beginning with the earth itself, coming down to our day, and spreading over the whole earth, we infer the unity as well as the unlimited existence of the great Artificer of all.

§ 33. Now how is it in point of fact? Let us, in order to answer this, go back, under the guidance of geology, to survey the beginning of organic life. Here we may pause for a moment, to notice an error of the most fascinating and graphic of all the historians of the pre-Adamite earth-the late Hugh Miller.

Impressed, as was natural to his passionate and manly temperament, with a vehement sense of the falsity of the theory of the author of the "Vestiges of Creation," he seized upon an imperfect induction to give an additional blow to an hypothesis which he had already effectually demolished by arguments of unquestioned validity. He

thought, and in this he has been followed by others seeking to strengthen a theological analogy which requires no such support, that after the first animal creation there was a fall in the creative type. The earlier fishes and reptiles he held to be of a more perfect order, and these, he maintained, were followed by a series of lower and more degraded creations. Such, however, as has been abundantly demonstrated by an able and recent observer in our own country, is not the case. * The Ganoids and Placoids, on which Mr. Miller relied as instances of the superiority of the earlier creations, united, indeed, features which placed them in a higher position than the typical fishes that succeeded them, for, as embryos, they exhibited capacities which, though undeveloped in themselves, were the insignia of far higher forms afterwards to succeed. They were, in fact, the obscure prophecies of subsequent productions, but as prophecies they were interpreted and dignified by the event, but did not anticipate and pre-establish it. During the paleozoic period they were the "sole representatives of the vertebrate type, combining in themselves the characters of all classes." "The Sigillaria and Leipodendron stood as the representatives of both Cryptogram and Phonogram, until these two ideas were separately and more distinctly expressed by the subsequent introduction of the typical forms of these two classes. It is as if nature first sketched her work in general terms and

* See Professor Le Conte's Lecture on Coal, Smithsonian Institute, 1857, p. 167. Prof. Agassiz, as will be seen, incidentally adopts the same position, which is also maintained with great fullness by Dr. Harris in his Pre-Adamite Earth.

then elaborated each subordinate idea in separate families; all these families, taken together as an organic whole, still containing the original idea in a more completely developed form, as if the problem of organic nature was first expressed in a few simple but comprehensive symbols, and then differentiated."* But while there was in the beginning this. creation, as it were, of an outline pattern, (just in the same way, to adopt an illustration from the writer just quoted, as we observe in the first organization of human society the grouping together in individuals of several social functions, each man being, however imperfectly, his own blacksmith, shoemaker, and farmer, while afterwards, as the race progresses, the trades divide, each performing its functions the more perfectly, because separately,) yet there was no subsequent automaton development of the future stages of life. "If there is anything," is the conclusion of the very interesting paper now before us, "which geology teaches with clearness, it is that the animal and vegetable kingdoms did not commence as monads, or vital points, but as organisms, so perfect that even the maddest Lamarckian must admit that they could not have been formed by agency of physical forces; that species did not pass into one another by transmission, but that each species was introduced in full perfection, remained unchanged during the term of their existence, and died in full perfection; that physical conditions cannot change one species into another, but that a species will rather give up its life than its specific character." "As far as the evidence of geology extends, each species was intro

* Smithsonian Institute, 1857, p. 165.