with me, and your eyes give you no help. Imagine, if you choose, that
the order which strikes you so profoundly has subsisted from the
beginning. But leave me free to think that it has done no such thing,
and that if we went back to the birth of things and scenes, and
perceived matter in motion and chaos slowly disentangling itself, we
should come across a whole multitude of shapeless creatures, instead of
a very few creatures highly organised. If I have no objection to make to
what you say about the present condition of things, I may at least
question you as to their past condition. I may at least ask of you, for
example, who told you--you and Leibnitz and Clarke and Newton--that in
the first instances of the formation of animals, some were not without
heads and others without feet? I may maintain that these had no
stomachs, and those no intestines; that some to whom a stomach, a
palate, and teeth seemed to promise permanence, came to an end through
some fault of heart or lungs; that the monsters annihilated one another
in succession, that all the faulty (_vicieuses_) combinations of matter
disappeared, and that _those only survived whose mechanism implied no
important mis-adaptation_ (contradiction), _and who had the power of
supporting and perpetuating themselves_.

"On this hypothesis, if the first man had happened to have his larynx
closed, or had not found suitable food, or had been defective in the
parts of generation, or had failed to find a mate, then what would have
become of the human race? It would have been still enfolded in the
general depuration of the universe; and that arrogant being who calls
himself Man, dissolved and scattered among the molecules of matter,
would perhaps have remained for all time hidden in the number of mere
possibilities.

"If shapeless creatures had never existed, you would not fail to insist