To conclude; bodily form may be almost regarded as idea and memory in a solidified state—­as an accumulation of things each one of them so tenuous as to be practically without material substance.  It is as a million pounds formed by accumulated millionths of farthings; more compendiously it arises normally from, and through, action.  Action arises normally from, and through, opinion.  Opinion, from, and through, hypothesis.  “Hypothesis,” as the derivation of the word itself shows, is singularly near akin to “underlying, and only in part knowable, substratum;” and what is this but “God” translated from the language of Moses into that of Mr. Herbert Spencer?  The conception of God is like nature—­it returns to us in another shape, no matter how often we may expel it.  Vulgarised as it has been by Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and others who shall be nameless, it has been like every other corruptio optimi—­pessimum:  used as a hieroglyph by the help of which we may better acknowledge the height and depth of our own ignorance, and at the same time express our sense that there is an unseen world with which we in some mysterious way come into contact, though the writs of our thoughts do not run within it—­used in this way, the idea and the word have been found enduringly convenient.  The theory that luck is the main means of organic modification is the most absolute denial of God which it is possible for the human mind to conceive—­while the view that God is in all His creatures, He in them and they in Him, is only expressed in other words by declaring that the main means of organic modification is, not luck, but cunning.

Footnotes: 

{17a} “Nature,” Nov. 12, 1885.

{20a} “Hist.  Nat.  Gen.,” tom. ii. p. 411, 1859.

{23a} “Selections, &c.”  Trubner & Co., 1884. [Out of print.]

{29a} “Selections, &c., and Remarks on Romanes’ ’Mental Intelligence in Animals,’” Trubner & Co., 1884. pp. 228, 229. [Out of print.]

{35a} Quoted by M. Vianna De Lima in his “Expose Sommaire,” &c., p. 6.  Paris, Delagrave, 1886.

{40a} I have given the passage in full on p. 254a of my “Selections,” &c. [Now out of print.] I observe that Canon Kingsley felt exactly the same difficulty that I had felt myself, and saw also how alone it could be met.  He makes the wood-wren say, “Something told him his mother had done it before him, and he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and had inherited her instinct (as we call hereditary memory, to avoid the trouble of finding out what it is and how it comes).” —­Fraser, June, 1867.  Canon Kingsley felt he must insist on the continued personality of the two generations before he could talk about inherited memory.  On the other hand, though he does indeed speak of this as almost a synonym for instinct, he seems not to have realised how right he was, and implies that we should find some fuller and more satisfactory explanation behind this, only that we are too lazy to look for it.