These theories are, of course, not all antagonistic to one another. They resolve themselves into two groups, a theistic and an atheistic. The former includes the first four; the latter, the fifth. Any one who believes in God may suppose a primary creation of matter and energy, a subsequent moulding and fashioning of them mediately and under natural law, and also a gradual evolution of many new things by the interaction of things previously made. This complex idea of the origin of things seems, indeed, to be the rational outcome of Theism. It is also the idea which underlies the old record in the book of Genesis, where we have first an absolute creation, and then a series of "makings" and "placings," and of things "bringing forth" other things, in the course of the creative periods. On the other hand, Agnosticism postulates primary force or forces self-existent and including potentially all that is subsequently evolved from them. The only way in which it approximates to theism is in its extreme monistic form, where the one force or power supposed to underlie all existence is a sort of God shorn of personality, will, and reason. The actual relations of these opposing theories to science cannot be better explained than by a reference to the words of a leading monist, whose views we shall have to notice in the next lecture. "If," says Haeckel, "anybody feels the necessity of representing the origin of matter as the work of a supernatural creative force independent of matter itself, I would remind him that the idea of an immaterial force creating matter in the first instance is an article of faith which has nothing to do with science. Where faith begins, science ends." Precisely so, if only we invert the last sentence and say, "Where science ends, faith begins." It is only by faith that we know of any force, or even of the atoms of matter themselves, and in like manner it is "by faith we know that the creative ages have been constituted by the word of God."[1] The only difference is that the monist has faith in the potency of nothing to produce something, or of something material to exist for ever and to acquire at some point of time the power spontaneously to enter on the process of development; while the theist has faith in a primary intelligent Will as the Author of all things. The latter has this to confirm his faith--that it accords with what we know of the inertia of matter, of the constancy of forces, and of the permanence of natural law, and is in harmony with the powers of the one free energy we know--that of the human will. FOOTNOTE: [1] Epistle to Hebrews, xi. 3. LECTURE II. THE SCIENCE OF LIFE AND MONISTIC EVOLUTION.