whole as such; and if the attention, that is, the finite and particular power of thought, which constitutes the soul, be directed upon any particular portion of the series, out of the whole field of the finite thought and knowledge, he remembers, or recollects, that portion only; the rest stands not re-created, not seen, and therefore, forgotten, and, for the time being, as if it never had been. The want of power to bring up the whole array, or any particular portion of it, is a want of memory of that whole, or that portion, which has thereby passed into irretrievable oblivion. And herein lies the strength, or weakness, of the memory: it depends upon the habit and continuous intensity of the power of thought itself, first, in observing, that is, perceiving and conceiving accurately and distinctly the things to be remembered; secondly, on frequent re-creation, re-production, and contemplation of them, with the aid of association and all other aids; and, thirdly, on the given power of thought itself, wherein, at last, is the faculty of re-creation of conceptions, and recognition of their correspondence and identity with what has been in the mind before, and perhaps never lost entirely out of remembrance. In total oblivion, all is absolute nonentity and as if it had never been; being vanished into "airy nothing." If this faculty of memory were as powerful in man as in God, human memory would rise to the absolute power and continuity of the Divine Remembrance, and all things which he should desire and determine to remember and keep in existence in his thought and contemplation, out of all the facts and events, percep tions and conceptions, the thought and knowledge of his life, would be ever present and clear to his consciousOmniscience belongs only to the Creator. ness. The mastodon has ceased to exist: his bones only remain. They, only, continue to be remembered, and so held and carried forward in the divine remembrance, in a certain changing permanency, as fit material for the construction of a rind of globe, while at the same time furnishing a suffi cient record for our reading. The animal that was is otherwise vanished utterly into oblivion. We may gather up the remembered relics of him, together with the remaining traces of his time and country, and, out of these materials and such analogies as can be drawn from whatever else we know, re-create him in our own minds as nearly as we can, as a Cuvier approximately re-constructs and restores an extinct fauna of a buried age. The difference between the pictured human creation as restoration and the living reality of past time, being a sort of imperfect reminiscence, may help us to realize how vast, and of what nature, is the difference between the human and the divine creator. Again, let superficial science take the animal kingdom now existent on the surface of the globe, and arrange the whole on a horizontal base-line, in a linear branching series, according to the order of ascent and succession in the scale of being of the ideal types, in a true and complete zoological classification (and it will be all the same, whether embryology, with Agassiz, or the nervous system, with Owen, be taken as basis), from the lowest cell-animalcule up to man, placing the animal cell toward the horizon; and then let deep science turn the distal end of the series downward to a right angle in the direction of a radius to the Earth's centre; suppose it to reach through a complete series of all the geological formations that have anywhere been laid down, so as to represent a continuous zoological province, even from that lowest fossiliferous stratum in which the first animal cell came into existence (and you may be sure there is such a stratum, though no geological observer has ever yet found in it any fossil remains of such primitive animalcules); and you will find, on comparison, that there is a very exact correspondence, if not absolute identity, in the order of succession, or setting in, of the more general ideal types (as of Branch, Class, Order,) between the superficial series of zoological classification and the fossil branching series of actual nature in geological time; that is, between the series of this one time now, and its serial succession of spaces, and that of the serial succession of times past, and their accompanying spaces on the successively existent surfaces of the globe. So we have in space here, now, what was in time there, then; and this, for us, is a kind of reminiscence after the manner of Plato and Bacon. You will observe, also, a general correspondence, or resemblance, in the more general types themselves, but with differences increasing in amount, more and more, in the direction of the lesser and subordinate types (as of genera and species), distributed throughout the whole branching series, and running out into final extinction in the lesser types of genera, species, and individuals. The identity or resemblance may be said to measure the continuity of the divine remembrance, in respect of these ideal types. The differences exhibit the amount of change in the divine mind, or oblivion of old and creation of new, in that vast series of times and in that almost infinite series of terrestrial spaces successively existing in these times; in which, a few of the more general types, many of the lesser, and nearly all genera and species down to the later periods, have, from time to time, vanished into oblivion, while many new types, especially the lesser, have come into existence. Indeed, only one, the most general type of all, the cell, wherein is the unity and starting-point of the whole, spans the entire series in absolute continuity; for, in that, the divine remembrance has been continuous from the very beginning. And it matters not, that the work of creating new cells, or that new (sometimes called "spontaneous") generation of new individuals of the lowest forms of animal life, has continued to run along down the base of the pyramid of the animal kingdom from the beginning of animal life to the present day; for the ideal type in them, for the most part, continues the same, and the innermost laboratory of God and Nature is never closed. And so have continued 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." 2 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 2 Nat. Hist. § 525. 1 Nat. Hist. § 93. 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 tion; terms. § 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 constituas if metaphysics and moonshine were synonymous 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;' "2 and again, 1 De Aug. Scient., L. III. c. 4. |