5. This is, it would seem, the manner in which a reasonable and reverent man would regard the proof of a Supreme Creator and Governor, which is derived from Design, as seen in the organic creation; and the mode in which such proof would be affected by changes in the knowledge which we may acquire of the general laws by which the organic creation is constituted and governed. And hence, if it should be found to be established by the researches of the most comprehensive and exact philosophy, that there are, in any province of the universe, resemblances, gradations, general laws, indications of the mode in which one form approaches to another, and seems to pass into and generate another, which tend to obliterate distinctions which at first appeared broad and conspicuous; still the argument, from the design which appears in the parts of which we most clearly see the purpose, would not lose its force. If, for instance, it should be made apparent, by geological investigations of the extinct fossil creation, that the animal forms which have inhabited the earth, have gradually approached to that type in which the human form is included, passing from the rudest and most imperfect animal organizations, mollusks, or even organic monads, to vertebrate animals, to warm-blooded animals, to monkeys, and to men; still, the evidences of design in the anatomy of man are not less striking than they were, when no such gradation was thought of. And what is more to the purpose of our argument, the evidences of the peculiar nature and destination of man, as shown in other characters than his anatomy,--his moral and intellectual nature, his history and capacities,--stand where they stood before; nor is the vast chasm which separates man, as a being with such characters as these latter, from all other animals, at all filled up or bridged over.