mostly without consciousness that they were either furthering or hindering human progress, how happens it that such benefits have been achieved, and to what shall we attribute achievement of them?"
To Mr. Harrison, if his allegiance to his master is unqualified, no answer which he will think satisfactory can be given; for M. Comte negatives the recognition of any cause for the existence of human beings and the "Great Being" composed of them. It was one of his strange inconsistencies that, though he held it legitimate to inquire into the evolution of the Solar System (as is shown by his acceptance of the nebular hypothesis), and though he treats of human society as a product of evolution, yet all that region lying between the formation of planets and the origin of primitive man, was interdicted by him. To those, however, who accept the doctrine of organic evolution, either with or without the doctrine of evolution at large, the obvious answer to the above question will be that if "veneration and gratitude" are due at all, they are due to that Ultimate Cause from which Humanity, individually and as a whole, in common with all other things, has proceeded. There is nothing in embodied Humanity but what results from the properties of its units—properties mainly prehistoric, and in a small measure generated by social life. If we ask whence come these properties—these structures and functions, bodily and mental—we must go for our answer to the slow operation of those processes of modification and complication through which, with the aid of surrounding conditions, ever themselves growing more involved, there have been produced the multitudinous organic types, up to the highest. If we persist in putting question beyond question, we are carried back to those more general causes which determined the structure and composition of the Earth during its concentration; and eventually we are carried back to the nebulous mass in which there existed, undistinguished into those concrete forms we now know, the forces out of which all things contained in the Solar System have come, and in which there must have been, as Professor Tyndall expresses it, "the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." Whether we contemplate such external changes as those of stars moving ten miles per second, and those which now in hours, now in years, now in centuries, arrange molecules into a crystal; or whether we contemplate internal changes, arising in us as ideas and feelings, and arising also in the chick which but a few weeks since was a viscid yelk, we are compelled to recognize everywhere an Energy capable of all forms and which has been ever assuming new forms, from the remotest time to which science carries us back down to the passing moment. If we take the highest product of evolution, civilized human society, and ask to what agency all its marvels must be credited, the inevitable answer is—To that Unknown Cause of which the entire Cosmos is a manifestation.
A spectator who, seeing a bubble floating on a great river, had his attention so absorbed by the bubble that he ignored the river—nay,
