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the types of branches since they once began, or of classes, or orders, or, it may be, of some genera, and even of some species, in a continuous and unbroken line of linear descent. An exact and complete natural history, that should be, like that contemplated by Bacon, "a high kind of natural magic,"1 would exhibit to our view the actual course of the divine thought in the creation of an animal kingdom: and this, again, would be a kind of reminiscence in us.

In like manner, let superficial science take the existing human races, down to the anthropoid apes, and arrange them in one linear branching series, somewhat as in a lineal tree of family descent, according to ideal type and rank in the scale of being, as if you should place in line a large family of children in the order of their ages, from the man of twenty-one down to the child creeping on all fours; and the deep science of actual nature will show that the series truly represents in general the order of succession and distribution in which the several races or types of men have come into existence on the earth; for, the races, like the children of a family, and indeed the whole animal kingdom, may be said, at last, to be strung on the great umbilical cord or branching ideal thread of embryological evolution; along which takes place the gradual transition of type, or what Bacon calls "a transmutation of species." The Apes begin to appear in the Eocene; Man has been found near the beginning of the Pleistocene, and doubtless existed in the Pliocene, and may possibly yet be found as far back as the Miocene. Actually observed facts are not yet sufficient to enable us to assign the exact order of the fossil succession in actual nature, but enough is known, already, to warrant the conclusion, on the whole, which is also borne out by the analogies of all the rest of the fossil zoology and the known principles of living zoology, that the race which is lowest in the scale of creation, on the present surface of the earth, is likewise the oldest in geological 1 Nat. Hist. § 93. 2 Nat. Hist. § 525.

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time. The older and inferior races run out into extinction and disappear, as the newer and superior come forward: in the order of divine providence, the old passes into oblivion as the new appears.

Says Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, "I take care not to lend to God any intention: I pretend only to the character of the historian of what is." It is not probable that the Creator has occasion to borrow intentions from any mortal. It may be, that in searching for "final causes men have looked, as it were, through the wrong end of the telescope: through the direct scope of intellectual vision (Sapience), the primal efficient and essential cause is seen to be intelligent, divine, and enough. What we have to do, is, undoubtedly, to observe the fact, and to open our eyes that we may see; for, as Bacon says, "the Wisdom of God shines forth the more wonderfully, when Nature does one thing, and Providence elicits another, as if the character of Providence were stamped upon all forms and natural motions." 1

§ 7. ALL SCIENCE.

Physical science cannot help being also metaphysical science. Most scientific methods and men seem to ignore metaphysics altogether; and but few scientific societies admit a department of metaphysics into their constitution; as if metaphysics and moonshine were synonymous terms. But in all ages as now the greatest men of science have been also metaphysicians, who have recognized the truth, more or less clearly, that all physical inquiry leads directly into that realm of universals and pure metaphysics, wherein the universe has to be contemplated as the actual thought of a Divine Thinker. Says one of these (not among the least distinguished of our time): "The true thought of the created mind must have had its origin from the Creator; but with him, thought is reality;" and again,

1 De Aug. Scient., L. III. c. 4.
2 Address of Prof. Peirce, 1854.

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"It seemed to him the only way for us to understand the organization of the universe was that by which we must understand any human work. We would not understand a play of Shakespeare, until we tried to construct it over again for ourselves. Then and then only could we understand how all the parts of the play belonged together. So with regard to the work of the Deity; it was not possible for us to understand this as an organization, until we looked at it from the point of view of the Creator." Another distinguished light of science discourses concerning animals, thus: "The very nature of these beings and their relations to one another and to the world in which they live exhibit thought, and can therefore be referred only to the immediate action of a thinking being, even though the manner in which they were called into existence remains for the present a mystery;" and again, "This growing coincidence between our systems and that of nature shows further the identity of the operations of the human mind and the Divine Intellect."2 Again, speaking of the entire animal kingdom, "When we came to the conviction that this whole was the combination of these facts in a logical manner, and as whatever intelligence we had was derived from Him and in His image, that coincidence made it possible for us to understand his objects." 8

That coincidence must be considered, of course, as extending to all the fundamental and eternal laws of artistically creative thought. These laws and modes of action being the same for all thought, and soul or thinking power being everywhere essentially identical in nature, created objects in nature are transferred to our minds as copied conceptions, as it were; and the copy is formed in the mind, on the data given in sensation, by a power of the same nature, acting under the same laws and in the same modes

1 Prof. Peirce on Analytic Morphology, Ann. Sci. Disc. 1856.
2 Agassiz; Contrib. to Nat. Hist. of N. Amer., I. 13-23.

3 Agassiz (Ann. Sci. Disc. 1856).

as that by which the original is itself conceived and created, differing only in degree of power and in extent and scope of conscious intellectual vision, as the finite and special must differ from the infinite and absolute; and the copied conception will be as accurate, true, and complete as the observation is thorough, particular, and exact, and the senseperception distinct, and no more so. And these conceptions will be as lasting and permanent as the power of memory is intense and the will strong. Hamlet must have understood the matter much in the same way, when he said:

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Observation by the senses and by instruments in aid of the senses, actual sensible experience, necessarily has a limit; but that limit by no means ascertains and fixes the bounds of all certain and scientific knowledge. The mind, by its own original power of thought, is able not only to grasp the laws and modes of its own special activity, in a critical analysis of the mental phenomena as facts, and in a sound psychology, but also to arrive at a knowledge therein of the true nature of cause or power, of matter or substance, of thought itself, and by that means to transcend that limit of sensible experience, and to advance beyond the field of physical inquiry into the region of purely metaphysical fact and universal laws, and by the study of these further facts and laws as a matter of intellectually observed truth, to attain to a rational comprehension of the true nature of that uncaused power that creates the universe; and, at last, to see, that the whole must, and does, exist as the actual thought of a Divine Thinker, and not otherwise.

As Bacon expresses it, "all learning is knowledge acquired, and all knowledge in God is original "; that is, with him, thought and knowledge are one; and so, that "the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one."1 Plato, Philo Judaeus, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Bruno, Spinoza, Hooker, Berkeley, Swedenborg, and many others of the olden times as well as of these later days, seem to have conceived the matter much in the same way. So Bacon must have understood the creation: in fact, this is precisely what he meant, when he said he trusted his philosophy, when fully unfolded, “would plainly constitute a Marriage of the Human Mind to the Universe, having the Divine Goodness for bridesmaid."2 In no other way, perhaps, was it ever possible for any man to arrive at any comprehensible philosophy of the universe. Without such a philosophy, the observed facts of experimental science can present nothing to human intelligence but an incongruous, heterogeneous, and incomprehensible mass of particulars a world of facts tumbled together pell-mell; and hence all those absurd systems, theological, or atheistical, which have, in all times, beclouded the understandings of men. The English Astronomer Royal reports his magnetical and meteorological observations as obtained "with the utmost completeness and exactitude"; but he is absolutely "stopped from making further progress by the total absence of even empirical theory." His case may be hopeless; but he is certainly entitled to credit for not undertaking to make headway in that business by the help of any theory to be derived from Biblical theology, the properties of dead substratum, Comtean positivism, or any Queckett-figuring of probabilities, or other sort of Babbage-machine philosophy, however useful such machinery may be in other matters.

Even the sixty-two or more simple "undecomposable substances," of which, thus far, the globe appears to chem1 Praise of Knowl., Works (Mont.), I. 251.

2 Delineatio, Works (Boston), VII. 55.

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