SOPHEREUS. Let me state for myself just what my conclusions are in regard to the solar system. You will then know what the convictions are with which I shall come to the study of other departments. I have arrived at the conception of an Infinite Being having the power to create anything that seems to him good; and I have experienced no difficulty in conceiving what an act of creation is. I have also reached the conviction that there is one great object in Nature, the existence of which I can not account for without the hypothesis of some special act of creation. Whether I shall find this to be the case in regard to every other object in Nature, I can not now tell. Perhaps, as many of these objects are nearer to us, and more within our powers of investigation, the result may be different. I shall endeavor to keep my mind open to the necessary discriminations which facts may disclose. Possibly I may find reason to reverse the conclusions at which I have arrived in regard to the solar system, if I find that the hypothesis of evolution is fairly sustained by other phenomena. NOTE.--Newton, whose reasoning powers have certainly not been surpassed by those of any other philosopher, ancient or modern, not only deduced the existence of a personal God from the phenomena of Nature, but he felt no difficulty in ascribing to the Deity those personal attributes which the phenomena of Nature show that he must possess, because without them "all that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places" could not have been produced. They could, he reasons, "arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing." Newton does indeed say that all our notions of God are taken from the ways of mankind; but this is by way of allegory and similitude. There is a likeness, but not a perfect likeness. There is therefore no necessity for ascribing to God anthropomorphic attributes, because the enlargement of the faculties and powers to superhuman and boundless attributes takes them out of the category of anthropomorphic qualities and capacities. In his "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy," Newton had occasion to treat of the theory of vortices, as a hypothesis by which the formation of the solar system is to be explained. The "General Scholium," by which he concludes the third book of his "Principia," lays down the masterly reasoning by which he maintains that the bodies of the solar system, while they persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws. I had written the whole of the preceding chapter on the origin of the solar system just as I have printed it, before I looked into the "Principia" to see what confirmation might be derived from Newton's speculations. I found that while I had not included the comets in my examination of the solar system, but had confined myself