primitive cell, with which, it is supposed, all organisms begin, is in all the same, but, being placed in different situations, is developed here into a man, and there into a mushroom.  “The offspring,” he says, not without oracular twang, “is like its parent, not because it includes an immortal typical form, but because it is exposed in development to the same conditions as was its parent.”  Behold a cheap explanation of the mystery of life!  If one inquire how the vast variety of parental conditions was obtained, Dr. Draper is ready with his answer:—­“A suitableness of external situation called them forth,” quoth he.  An explanation nebulous enough to be sage!

Behold, therefore, a whole universe of life constructed by “Situations”!  “Situations” are the new Elohim.  They say to each other, “Let us make man”; and they do it!  But they cannot say, “Let us make man in our own image”; for they have no image.  No matter:  they succeed all the same in giving one to man!  Wonderful “Situations”!  Who will set up an altar to almighty “Situations”?

We have ourselves a somewhat Benjamite tongue for pronouncing the popular shibboleths, but, verily, we would sooner try the crookedest of them all than endeavor to persuade ourselves that in a universe wherein no creative idea lives and acts “external situations” can “call forth” life and all its forms.  We can understand that a divine, creative idea may develop itself under fixed conditions, as the reproductive element in opposite sexes may, under fixed conditions, prove its resources; but how, in a universe devoid of any productive thought, “external situations” can produce definite and animate forms, is, to our feeble minds, incomprehensible.  Verily, therefore, we will have nothing to do with these new gods.  The materialistic savans may cry Pagani at us, if they will; but we shall surely continue to kneel at the old altars, unless something other than the said “Situations” can be offered us in exchange.

We complain of Dr. Draper that he does not write in the spirit of science, but in the spirit of dogmatism.  We complain of him, that, when he ostensibly attempts a piece of pure scientific exposition, his thought always has a squint, a boomerang obliquity; it is afflicted with strabismus, and never looks where it seems to look.  He approaches history only to subject it to the service of certain pet opinions already formed before his inspection of history began.  He seeks only to make it an instrument for the propagation of these.  He is a philosophical historian in the same sense that Bossuet was a philosophical historian.  Each of these seeks to subject history to a dogma.  The dogma of Bossuet is Papal Catholicism; that of Dr. Draper is the creative supremacy of “Situations” and “the insignificance of man in the universe.”