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An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" - With a Notice of the Author's "Explanations:" A Sequel to the Vestiges by Anonymous
page 59 of 84 (70%)
tribe. (p. 267.) Again, human reason is considered no exclusive gift; it
exists subordinately in the instinct of brutes, and is alleged to be
nothing more than a mode of operation peculiar to the faculties in a
humble state of endowment, or early stage of development. CUVIER and
NEWTON are only intellectual expansions of a clown; and this notion is
extended to moral obliquities, the wicked man being characterised as one
"whose highest moral feelings are rudimental." (p. 358.) From a like
principle the writer concurs with Dr. PRICHARD, that mankind may have
had a common origin; that there exists no diversities of colour or
osseous structure not referable to climatable or other plastic agencies
influencing the development of the different races, commencing with the
lowest, or Negro tribe, and ascending upward through the intermediate
aboriginal American, Mongolian, and Malay, to the last and most perfect
stage of the Caucasian type.

Into the verity of these conclusions we are not called upon to enter;
they have been long in controversy, involve a great array of facts and
inductive inferences, and we have only referred to them as corollaries
or collaterals of the author's hypothetical fabric.


RELIGIOUS AND MORAL TENDENCIES.

We have no charge of impiety to bring against the _Vestiges_. Final
causes, or to express ourselves more intelligibly, a _purpose_ in
creation, is nowhere impugned. The Deity is not degraded by
impersonification in the form and frailties of mortality, but everywhere
the author reverently bows to that august and unsearchable name,
acknowledges the grand and benevolent design--the admirable adaptation
of every created thing to its end and place, and finally concludes in a
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