of a God on ground that can never be shaken."[9] A true and worthy conclusion, and a sufficient answer to the denunciations and arguments of the rest of the article, so far as philosophy and natural theology are concerned.  If a writer must needs use his own favorite dogma as a weapon with which to give coup de grace to a pernicious theory, he should be careful to seize it by the handle, and not by the blade.

We can barely glance at a subsidiary philosophical objection of the “North American” reviewer, which the “Examiner” also raises, though less explicitly.  Like all geologists, Mr. Darwin draws upon time in the most unlimited manner.  He is not peculiar in this regard.  Mr. Agassiz tells us that the conviction is “now universal among well-informed naturalists, that this globe has been in existence for innumerable ages, and that the length of time elapsed since it first became inhabited cannot be counted in years.”  Pictet, that the imagination refuses to calculate the immense number of years and of ages during which the faunas of thirty or more epochs have succeeded one another, and developed their long succession of generations.  Now the reviewer declares that such indefinite succession of ages is “virtually infinite,” “lacks no characteristic of eternity except its name,”—­at least, that “the difference between such a conception and that of the strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable.”  But infinity belongs to metaphysics.  Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not by scientific, but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is “essentially and completely metaphysical in character, resting altogether upon that idea of ‘the infinite’ which the human mind can neither put aside nor comprehend."[10] And so a theory which will be generally objected to as much too physical is transposed by a single syllogism to metaphysics.

Well, physical geology must go with it:  for, even on the soberest view, it demands an indefinitely long time antecedent to the introduction of organic life upon our earth. A fortiori is physical astronomy a branch of metaphysics, demanding, as it does, still larger “instalments of infinity,” as the reviewer calls them, both as to time and number.  Moreover, far the greater part of physical inquiries now relate to molecular actions, which, a distinguished natural philosopher informs us, “we have to regard as the results of an infinite number of infinitely small material particles, acting on each other at infinitely small distances,”—­a triad of infinites,—­and so physics becomes the most metaphysical of sciences.

Verily, on this view,

  “Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
  And nought is everything, and everything is
  nought.”

The leading objection of Mr. Agassiz is likewise of a philosophical character.  It is, that species exist only “as categories of thought,”—­that, having no material existence, they can have had no material variation, and no material community of origin.  Here the predication is of species in the subjective sense, while the inference is applied to them in the objective sense.  Reduced to plain terms, the argument seems to be:  Species are ideas; therefore the objects from which the idea is derived cannot vary or blend, cannot have had a genealogical connection.