Here, then, we have it propounded that after the creation of the rudest and simplest form of a visual organ, the infinite God abstains from direct and special creation of such a perfect and elaborate organ as the human eye, and leaves it to be worked out by natural selection; there being no logical impossibility, it is said, in this hypothesis. We are cautioned not to conclude, because we can not find the intermediate and transitional states of the visual organs, that they never existed; we are told that they are at least possible, and that analogies show they must have existed; and from the possibility of their existence and from the assumption that they happened, we are to believe that the Omnipotent God, refraining from the exercise of his power to create the human eye, with its wondrously perfect structure, left it to be evolved by natural selection out of the rudest and simplest visual organ which he directly fashioned.

All things are possible to an infinite Creator. He who made the visual organ of the lowest aquatic creature that ever floated could make the human eye as we know it, or could make one that would do more than the eye of man ever was capable of. He could by a direct exercise of his power of creation form the eye of man, or he could leave it to be evolved out of the only type of a visual organ on which he saw fit to exercise his creative power. He could create in the land-animals a true air-breathing lung as a special production of his will, or could permit it to be formed by transitional gradations out of the swim-bladder of an aquatic creature. But why should he abstain from the one method and employ the other? This question brings us at once to the probabilities of the case; and, in estimating those probabilities, we must take into the account all that reason permits us to believe of the attributes of the Almighty. We can not, it is true, penetrate into his counsels without the aid of revelation. But if we confine ourselves to the domain of science, or to the mere observation of nature, we shall find reason for believing that the Omnipotent God had purposes in his infinite wisdom that render the acts of special creation vastly more probable than the theory of evolution. A study of the animal kingdom and of all the phenomena of the universe leads us rationally and inevitably to one of two conclusions: either that there is no God, and that all things came by chance; or to the belief that there is a God, and that he is a being of infinite benevolence as well as infinite wisdom and power. Now, why should such a being, proposing to himself the existence on earth of such an animal as man, to be inhabited for a time by a soul destined to be immortal, abstain from the direct creation of both soul and body, and leave the latter to be evolved out of the lowest form of animal life, and the former to become a mere manifestation or exhibition of phenomena, resulting from the improved and more elaborate structures of successive types of animals? Is there no conceivable reason why an infinitely wise, benevolent, and omnipotent being should have chosen to exercise the direct power of creation in forming the soul of man for an immortal existence, and also to exercise his direct power of creation in so fashioning the body as to fit it with the utmost exactness to be serviceable and subservient to the mind which is to inhabit it for a season? Why depict the infinite God as a quiescent and retired spectator of the operation of certain laws which he has imposed upon organized matter, when there are discoverable so many manifest reasons for the special creation of such a being as man? It is hardly in accordance with any rational theory of God's providence, after we have attained a conception of such a being, to liken him intentionally or unintentionally to the Demiurgus of the acute and ingenious Greek philosopher. We must conclude that human society, with all that it has done or is capable of doing for man on earth, was in the contemplation of the Almighty; and if we adopt this conclusion, we must account for the moral sense, for moral obligation, and for the idea of law and duty. We can not account for these things upon any probable theory of their origin, if we reject the idea that they were specially implanted in the structure of the human soul, and suppose that both the intellectual faculties and the moral sense were evolved out of the struggle of lower animals for their existence, resulting in the formation of higher animals and in the development of their social instincts into more complex, refined, and consciously calculating instincts of the same nature.

I have not drawn this parallel between the Platonic and the Darwinian theories of the origin of different animals for any purpose of suggesting that the one was in any sense borrowed from the other. Plagiarism, in any form, is not, so far as I know, to be detected in the writings of the evolution school. But the speculations of Plato in regard to the origin and nature of the human soul, fanciful as they are, afford great assistance in grasping the conception of a spiritual existence; and the parallel between his process of degradation and Darwin's process of elevation shows to my mind as great probability in the one theory as there is in the other.