tion lay in the superior congruency of the hypothesis—as contrasted with the special creation doctrine—with the methodological presuppositions of modern science and with the general view of nature which in most of the other provinces of science had already been accepted.
The basis of the doctrine of evolution consists, not in an experimental demonstration—for the subject is hardly accessible to this mode of proof—but in its general harmony with scientific thought. From contrast, moreover, it derives enormous relative strength. On the one side we have a theory which converts the Power whose garment is seen in the visible universe into an artificer, fashioned after the human model, and acting by broken effects, as man is seen to act. On the other side, we have the conception that all we see around us and feel within us—the phenomena of physical nature as well as those of the human mind—have their unsearchable roots in a cosmical life, . . . an infinitesimal span of which is offered to the investigation of man. Among thinking people, in my opinion, this last conception has a higher ethical value than that of a personal artificer.
Reviewing the past triumphs of the scientific method over supernaturalism, he concludes:
We claim, and we shall wrest, from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of Bcience must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control. . . . Acting otherwise proved always disastrous in the past, and it is simply fatuous to-day.
Similarly Romanes put in the fore-front of the arguments for evolution
The fact that it is in full accordance with what is known as the principle of continuity—by which is meant the uniformity of nature, in virtue of which the many and varied processes going on in nature are due to the same kind of method, i. e., the method of natural causation. . . . The explanations of. . . phenomena which are at first given are nearly always of the supernatural kind. . . . Now, in our own day there are very few of these strongholds of the miraculous left. . . . No one ever thinks of resorting to supernatural ism, except in the comparatively few cases where science has not yet been able to explore the most obscure regions of causation. . . . We are now in possession of so many of these historical analogies, that all minds with any instincts of science in their composition have grown to distrust on merely antecedent grounds, any explanation which embodies a miraculous element. . . . Now, it must be obvious to any mind which has adopted this attitude of thought, that the scientific theory of natural descent is recommended by an overwhelming weight of antecedent presumption.
Th "overwhelming weight of antecedent presumption" against special creation, and in favor of evolution, was pointed out by Chambers with entire clearness; his arguments present in part an almost verbal parallel to the passages I have quoted from Tyndall and Romanes. In the already established results of geology and astronomy, he writes in the "Vestiges":
