No less interesting are his arguments from the geological position. It was a difficulty which had long lain heavy on the mind of Byron when, the reader may remember, in his last days in 1823 he beat over much theological and metaphysical jungle with the Scottish doctor Kennedy--the greatness of the universe and the littleness of the paragon of animals man, and the consequent difficulty of satisfactorily allowing a redemptive movement in Heaven for man in all his petty weakness. Pascal had attempted to meet this by what Hallam calls 'a magnificent lamentation' and by a metaphysical subtlety, reasoning from this very smallness to his ultimate greatness. But the geological reasoning of Miller has the undoubted merit of being scientific and inductive. In geology the dominant note is, in one word, progress. 'There was a time in our planet,' and it will be noted that the argument is perfectly independent of the appearance of man, late with himself, early with Lyell, 'when only dead matter appeared, after which plants and animals of a lower order were made manifest. After ages of vast extent the inorganic yielded to the organic, and the human period began,--man, a fellow-worker with the Creator who first produced it. And of the identity of at least his intellect with that of his Maker, and, of consequence, of the integrity of the revelation which declares that he was created in God's own image, we have direct evidence in his ability of not only conceiving of God's own contrivances, but even of reproducing them, and this not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker.' Man thus, as Hegel says, re-thinks Creation. But higher yet the tide of empire takes its way. The geologist is not like the Neapolitan thinker, Vico, with his doctrine of recurring cycles in man. The geologist 'finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish--of the reptile--of the mammal. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been a progress Godwards--not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the first to furnish a point of union; and occupying that point as true God and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise the adorable Monarch of all the future.' Such an argument is indeed a reach above the vaguely declamatory theory of Swinburne of man being the master of all things, and above the theory of Feuerbach that finds God merely in the enlarged shadow projected by the Ego.