talk of a time of probation, of a gradual perfecting of things, implies a very human idea of the deity, and is mere twaddle. Why should there not be a regular gradation of beings up to God himself, and our world—I mean our solar system, or even the entire star drift ending with the Milky Way—be the production of one of them who did not properly understand his business—a mere attempt! The nebulae observed by Herschel are perhaps nothing but so many experiments, or the raw material possibly for future attempts. When I think of war, hunger, poverty and pestilence, I find it impossible to believe that all this is the work of a supremely wise being. It may be, however, that matter independent of such a being initiated the scheme, and introduced certain restrictions; so that the world became only relatively the best one, as indeed people have often taught already.
If we regard Nature as a teacher and us poor mortals as her pupils, we give the rein to altogether extraordinary ideas about the human race. Here we are sitting all together in a class room, possessing the faculties necessary to understand what is said, yet all the time paying more attention to the gossip of our fellow-pupils than to the lesson. And even when someone next us takes down a note or two, all we do is to filch it from him, steal some remark or other which he himself perhaps has but indistinctly caught, supplementing it with our personal orthographic and theoretic errors.
