is seen to act," designing this, fitting it to that, and adapting the finished product to the conditions under which it is to live. The belief in God rose out of the search after causes, or out of the idea that everything had a soul and needed a maker, who in course of time became a Deity. Mr. Herbert Spencer has in his elaborate and painful way resolved the doctrine of special creations into the residuum of the Greek and Hebrew cosmogonies,' and the idea of a constructive or architectural Deity, who builds each structure or forms each species according to a special plan, claims a like ancient parentage. And so the conclusion, in effect, is remove the idea of special creations, and the belief in God loses its basis; deny the existence of design in nature, and there is no evidence of a creating Deity. False ideas of nature have been the proofs of His existence. Science knows the way of nature, but finds in it no trace of God.

Now in the position thus baldly, but not incorrectly stated, there are two distinct questions, one historical, touching the actual genesis and growth of the belief; the other philosophical, touching the form in which it may or must be conceived and expressed. We begin with the historical.

1. Were the ideas that survive in the doctrines of special creations and design the ideas that generated the belief in God? In other words, did men become monotheists because they imagined that as a man was needed to build a house or construct a machine, so a God was needed to build or construct a world? Now one thing is certain, the belief in God existed before

"Principles of Biology," vol. i p. 335.
"First Principles," p. 33.

PRIMITIVE THEISM NO COSMOGONY.

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the idea of creation. God is a primary, creation is a secondary belief. It is a profound mistake to suppose that the primitive theologies or mythologies were cosmogonies. The earliest speech concerning the gods had no concern whatever with creation. Cosmogonic is the very latest phase of mythological speculation; its rise is proof that men have begun to ask concerning the what and whence and whither of themselves and the universe, and men who do that are men over whom the myth is ceasing to reign. Even in the case of the Hebrew, the purest monotheist of antiquity, creation was a comparatively late doctrine. The narrative in Genesis does not record their primitive belief; ages before it was written or dreamed of, the Fathers had believed in El Shaddai, the Almighty. And even after they conceived Him as the Creator, they did not conceive Him as "a manlike artificer," an anthropomorphic Deity, who as it were laboriously designed and constructed the universe in detail. To Mr. Herbert Spencer, who is as prosaic in handling ancient beliefs as he is imaginative in handling primordial forces, the "Hebrew idea" was "grossly anthropomorphic," representing "God as taking clay and moulding a new creature, as a potter might mould a vessel." But was this the essence of "the Hebrew idea"? or an audacious figure of speech? We must seek its essential characteristic in the words that explain the generic expression, "God created the heavens and the earth." "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," brooded, a living breath, full of life-giving warmth, over the bosom of the deep. And creation happens when God speaks, when He Principles of Biology," vol. i. p. 337.

says, "Let it be." But speech is the symbol of thought and the effect of volition, in it reason and will are alike expressed, and a creation achieved by the speech of God is a creation as it were thought into being. And this underlying notion, as far from anthropomorphism as the latest notion of modern science, is throughout determinative and distinctive of "the Hebrew idea." God is the Unseen, the Unsearchable, "covered with light as with a garment," yet with "clouds and darkness round about Him;" working unperceived on the left hand, hidden on the right, yet knowing the way man takes; far from no one while. invisible to all. He is in the heaven above, in the earth beneath, and in the uttermost abyss; He inhabiteth eternity; His name is the Eternal, the dwelling-place of man in all generations. His very name is, if you will allow the phrase, the happiest attempt ever made at de-anthropomorphizing Deity-Iahveh, or as it stands in our version, Jehovah. That term is no common noun, or proper name, or ordinary mode of denoting a familiar or manlike person; it is simply a verbal form expressing "He who is," or "He who brings to pass." It gives Him no name, leaves Him the awful, nameless Eternal Activity, who knows no time, but, changeless amid all our changes, lives the rational energy or will that made and moves the universe. No term could be more entirely free from the taint of anthropomorphism; scientific metaphysics will labour long before they find its fellow.

But it is not enough to deal with "the Hebrew idea"; we must look beyond it. The idea of God is in all the ancient mythologies older than the idea of creation, and it was by a speculative, almost by a

ARTIFICER-IDEA GREEK NOT HEBREW.

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scientific act, that the two ideas were brought into causal relations. This relation was not uniformly conceived. Sometimes the creative process was represented as one of emanation, sometimes as one of evolution, sometimes as one of production or construction, architecture or manufacture. The notion rarely assumed the latter form, the other and more natural were the more usual forms. It is an utter and even ignorant mistake to imagine that the idea of design, with its manlike artificer, was a theistic idea; it was in its origin purely scientific or philosophical. The story of its becoming is one of equal interest and instruction. It rose in Greece. The ancient Greek gods were not creators, were all created, had a beginning, were to have an end, stood within the order of nature, lived under the shadow of fate. Hesiod tells us that it was from the union of the "broad-bosomed earth" and "the starry Ouranos" that the gods sprang. One of the Homeric hymns makes earth the spouse of the starlit heaven, the mother of the gods. Pindar made gods and men of one race, sons of one mother. This ancient belief lived long and died slowly, as we may see from the typical question of the inquisitive child, anxious to discover who created the creator (related of Epicurus), "Who made chaos?" not who made God? The questions and perplexities occasioned by this belief had much to do with the scientific and philosophical awakening of the Greek mind. The nature it faced was full of mysterious problems which the religion made only the more insoluble. Heaven and earth did not seem the more intelligible for the want of an intelligent creator, they only the more imperatively demanded of the reason the discovery of a

E

sufficient cause.

The idea that Zeus was as much a creature as man did not seduce the mind into intellectual quiescence and content, but, on the contrary, stimulated the mind to ask, what had made Zeus and man alike begin to be? Greek philosophy arose in response to these necessities of thought; it was an attempt to answer the questions raised alike by nature and religion. In this attempt it did not seek either to oppose or supplement religion, but simply to satisfy the reason. It was characteristic that the earliest names for the cause were physical-water, air, fire, number or harmony. No man suggested the gods or god, because every man assumed that the primal cause must be cause of the gods as well as of nature and man. The first to suggest that order must have a rational author, was Anaxagoras, but his author was not Deity, was simply mind, ỏ vous. The problem passed on to Plato. His soul loved order and art, saw what it loved everywhere, and he argued that what intellect so enjoyed could not be without intellect, existed by it and for it. The fairest things were the things fullest of reason; and so as the fairest of all things was the cosmos, the eternal reason must have been its maker. So perfect a work of art was inconceivable without a perfect artificer; so harmonious a structure could not have risen without an architect and builder. The heavens were so beautiful a mechanism that they could not have come to be without a mechanic, a Anuovρyós, or Divine handicraftsman, who might most fitly be named God. Plato may be regarded as the inventor of the argument from design, but he invented it for the purposes of science, not in the interests of Theism, to explain nature or complete