42. That men are, only in a comparatively small number of cases, intellectual, moral, religious, and spiritual, in the degree which I have described, does not, by any means, deprive our argument of its force. The capacity of man is, that he may become this; and such a capacity may well make him a special object in the eyes of Him under whose guidance and by whose aid, such a development and elevation of his nature is open to him. However imperfect and degraded, however unintellectual, immoral, irreligious, and unspiritual, a great part of mankind may be, still they all have the germs of such an elevation of their nature; and a large portion of them make, we cannot doubt, no small progress in this career of advancement to a spiritual condition. And with such capacities, and such practical exercise of those capacities, we can have no difficulty in believing, if the evidence directs us to believe, that that part of the creation in which man has his present appointed place, is the special field of God's care and love; by whatever wastes of space, and multitudes of material bodies, it may be surrounded; by whatever races it may have been previously occupied, of brutes that perish, and that, compared with man, can hardly be said to have lived. FOOTNOTES: [1] Lyell, II. 420. [6th Ed.] [2] Cuvier. [3] By Bishop Berkeley. See Lyell, III. 346. [4] A recent popular writer, who has asserted the self-civilizing tendency of man, has not been able, it would seem, to adduce any example of the operation of this tendency, except a single tribe of North American Indians, in whom it operated for a short time, and to a small extent. CHAPTER VII. THE NEBULÆ 1. I have attempted to show that, even if we suppose the other bodies of the universe to resemble the Earth, so far as to seem, by their materials, forms, and motions, no less fitted than she is to be the abodes of life; yet that, knowing what we do of man, we can believe that the Earth is tenanted by a race who are the _special_ objects of God's care. Even if the tendency of the analogies of creation were, to incline us to suppose that the other planets are as well suited as our globe, to have inhabitants, still it would require a great amount of evidence, to make us believe that they have such inhabitants as we are; while yet such evidence is altogether wanting. Even if we knew that the stars were the centres of revolving systems, we should have an immense difficulty in believing that an Earth, with such a population as ours, revolves about any of them. If astronomy made a plurality of worlds probable, we have strong reasonings, drawn from other subjects, to think that the other worlds are not like ours.