leaves every difficulty unexplained, referring them all to causes not simply unknown but unconjecturable. What excuse, then, have philosophers, of all people, for doing this in preference to the simple expedient of supposing that, although the parturient bee, queen or other, cannot intend that any of her progeny should be more bounteously endowed than herself, there is an independent intelligence that does so intend? To content oneself with pronouncing such preference to be eminently unscientific is tenderness of language nearly akin, I fear, to literary bathos. III. I have said that the form of unbelief to which, on the principle of calling a spade a spade, I have taken the liberty of giving the name of Scientific Atheism, manifests itself now-a-days rather by ignoration than by formal denial of God. This, however, is not a new feature in any atheism really worthy of being styled scientific. Even as Mr. Darwin verbally recognises a Creator, although without assigning to Him any share in creation, even so Kant, when more than a century ago undertaking, in his 'General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies,'[42] to account for the constitution and mechanical origin of the universe on Newtonian principles, spoke of the elements as deriving their essential qualities from the 'eternal thought of the Divine Intelligence,' without, however, crediting the said Intelligence with having interposed in order to carry out His thoughts. 'Give me matter,' he says, 'and I will build the world;' and without other data than diffused atoms of matter endowed with simple attractive and repulsive forces, he proceeds to expound a complete cosmogony.