SOPHEREUS. Undoubtedly the opposite hypothesis is that which attributes to a Creator the production of organic life; and whether the Mosaic account, as it stands, be a fable or a true narrative of an actual occurrence, what we have to do is to ascertain, upon correct principles of reasoning, whether the creating power can be dispensed with. Mr. Spencer dispenses with it altogether. He gives it a direct negative in the most absolute manner. But the perfection of his theory depends upon its ability to sustain itself as an explanation of the existence of organisms without the intervention of a creating power anywhere at any time. I have already suggested the serious defect of his whole philosophic scheme as applied to the existence of organisms, namely, that the foundation of the theory, the existence of the molecules with their properties and capacities tending to rearrangement under the laws of matter and motion, those laws themselves, and the environing conditions which assist the process of adjustment and combination, must all have had an origin, or a cause. If we can get along without that origin, without any cause, without any actor laying the foundations of the world, we can make a theory. But that theory can not sustain itself by such a negation if all experience, observation, and reflection amount to anything; for these all point in one direction. They all tend to show that every existing thing must have had a cause, that every product must have had an origin, and, if we place that origin in the operation of certain laws of matter and motion upon and among the primal molecules of matter, we still have to look for the origin of those laws and of the molecules on which they have operated. If we say that these things had no origin, that they existed without having been caused to exist, we end in a negation at which reason at once rebels. If, on the other hand, we reject, as we must reject, this negation, then the same power which could establish the laws of matter and motion, and give origin to the molecules and the favoring conditions by which their aggregated higher forms are supposed to have been developed, was alike capable of the direct production of species, the creation of the sexes, and the establishment of the laws of procreation and gestation. So that it becomes a question of probability, of the weight of evidence, as to whether we can explain the phenomena of species, of the sexual division and the sexual union, with all that they involve, without the hypothesis of direct intervention, design, and formative skill of a boundless character. I have seen no explanation of the origin of species and of the sexual distinction, with its concomitant methods of reproduction, that does not end in an utter blank, whenever it undertakes to dispense with that kind of direct design to which is derisively given the name of "miraculous interposition," but which in truth implies no miracle at all.