But if "variation" and "natural selection" have played important parts in the economy of nature, why may not "specific creation" have played _its_ part also? Positive science can hardly flatter itself with the belief that it is rolling back the mystery of the universe to a point beyond which "specific creation" might not have commenced, or the divine fiat been put forth. To believe in the possibility of a rational synthesis, limited to sensible experience, or phenomenal facts within our reach, that shall climb from law to law, or from concrete fact to abstract conception, until it shall reach the _Ultima Thule_ of all law, is to carry the faith of the scientist beyond the most transcendental belief of the theologian, and make him a greater dupe to his illusions than was ever cloistered in a monastery or affected austerity therein as a balm to the flesh. We may substitute new dogmatisms for old ones, but we can never postulate a principle that shall make the general laws of nature any less mysterious than the partial or exceptional, or that shall in the long run, render "natural selection" any more comprehensible, or acceptable to the rational intuition, than "specific creation." For while one class of scientists is climbing the ladder of synthesis, by assigning a reason for a higher law that may be predicated of a lower, we shall find the broader and more analytical mind accepting the higher mystery for the lower, and, by divesting its faith of all metaphysical incumbrance, landing in the belief of an all-encompassing law, which shall comprehend the entire assemblage of known laws and facts in the universe. And the natural drift of the human mind is ever towards this abstract conception--this one all-encompassing law of the universe. It steadily speculates in this direction, and some of the highest triumphs of our age, in physical as well as metaphysical science, are measurably due to this tendency. The scientific mind is not confined wholly to experimental research. It is stimulated to higher contemplations, and is constantly disposed to make larger and more comprehensive groupings of analogous facts. It is fast coming to regard light, heat, electricity, magnetism, gravitation, chemical affinity, molecular force, and even Mr. Darwin's little whirligig, as only so many manifestations or expressions of one and the same force in the universe--that ultimate, all-encompassing, divine force (not to speak unscientifically) that upholds the order of the heavens, "binds the sweet influences of the Pleiades, brings forth Mazzaroth in his season, and guides Arcturus with his suns."