In his "Explanations,"[1] 1846, he puts the considerations urged by Romanes far more tellingly than Romanes put them forty years later. Chambers wrote:
The whole question stands thus: For the theory of universal order—that is, order as presiding both in the origin and administration of the world—we have the testimony of a vast number of facts in nature, and this one in addition—that whatever is reft from the domain of ignorance and made undoubted matter of science, forms a new support to the same doctrine. The opposite view, once predominant, has been shrinking for ages into lesser space, and now maintains a footing only in a few departments of nature which happen to be less liable than others to a clear investigation. The chief of these, if not the only one, is the origin of the organic kingdoms. So long as that remains obscure the supernatural will have a certain hold upon enlightened persons. . . . One after another the phenomena of nature, like so many revolted principalities, have fallen under the dominion of order and law; but here is one little province still faithful to the Boeotian government; and as it is nearly the last, no wonder it is so vigorously defended. As in the political world, however, men do not trust in the endurance of a dynasty which is reduced to a single city or nook of its dominions, so we may expect a speedy extinction to a doctrine which has been driven from every portion of nature but one or two limited fields.
Huxley, it is true, seems in his pre-Darwinian period to have disapproved of this type of argument; creation being "perfectly conceivable. . . the so-called a priori arguments against the possibility of creative acts" appeared to him "to be devoid of reasonable foundation." This, of course, was a perverse misapprehension of the issue. It was not a question of conceivability, but of the relative probability of the only two available hypotheses. And the first criterion of probability in such a case must be the agreeement of any proposed hypothesis with the general type of hypothetical explanations which the whole previous experience of men of science has found to be capable of fruitful application, and of the sort of verification which comes through fruitful application. By such a criterion, no hesitation between the two hypotheses was admissible. "Special acts of creative volition" had never been found by science to be a vera causa at all; the hypothesis was vague, sterile, impossible of verification, contrary to all the principles of method by the use of which the past successes of science had been achieved; "gradual development through natural descent" was, as a
- ↑ This supplement to the "Vestiges" seems to be little known; it is in many respects superior to the original volume.
