When I first read this passage I could hardly trust the evidence of my eye-sight. It seemed as if the types must have in some way misrepresented the distinguished writer; for I could scarcely conceive how a man of Mr. Spencer's reputation as a thinker could have deliberately penned and published such a specimen of logic run riot. It reads like some of the propositions propounded by the scholastics of the middle ages. But, having assured myself that the American edition of his work is a correct reprint, and having carefully pondered and endeavored to ascertain his meaning, I was forced to the conclusion that he supposes this to be a conclusive answer to the idea of absolute creation in respect to anything whatever, because, when put into a logical formula, one term of the relation is nothing, and the other term is something. Logical formulas are not always the best tests of the possibility of an intellectual conception, or of what the mind can represent to itself by thought, although to a certain class of readers or hearers they often appear to be a crushing refutation of the opposite opinion or belief against which they are employed. Is there in truth anything impossible because it is unthinkable in the idea of absolute creation? Is the creation of matter, for example, inconceivable? It certainly is not if we adopt the postulate of an infinite Creator. That postulate is just as necessary to the evolutionist who maintains the ordination of fixed laws or systems of matter, by the operation of which the organized forms of matter have been evolved, as it is to those who maintain that these forms are special creations. Who made the laws that have been impressed upon matter? Were they made at all, or were they without any origin, self-existing and eternal? If they were made, they were made out of nothing, for nothing preceded them. Then apply to them the logical formula, and say that one term of the relation is absent--is mere nothingness--and so there is an impossible relation, a relation in thought between nothing and something, which is inconceivable. This dilemma is not escaped by asserting, as Mr. Spencer does, that "the creation of force is just as inconceivable as the creation of matter." It is necessary to inquire what he means by a "conceivable" idea. If he means that we can not trace or understand the process by which either force or matter was created, our inability may be at once conceded. But if he means that, granting the postulate of an infinite creating power, we can not conceive of the possibility that matter and all the forces that reside in it or govern it were called into being by the will of that power, the assertion is not true. Human faculties are entirely equal to the conception of an infinite creating power, whatever may be the strength or the weakness of the proof by which the existence of such a power is supported; and if there is such a power it is a contradiction in terms to assert that absolute creation,