believe anything of the kind.

How much evidence would you require to believe that there was a time
when stones fell upwards, or granite made itself by a spontaneous
rearrangement of the elementary particles of clay and sand? And yet the
difficulties in the way of these beliefs are as nothing compared to
those which you would have to overcome in believing that complex organic
beings made themselves (for that is what creation comes to in scientific
language) out of inorganic matter.

I know it will be said that even on the transmutation theory, the first
organic being must have made itself. But there is as much difference
between supposing the passage of inorganic matter into an AMOEBA, e.g.,
and into an ELEPHANT, as there is between supposing that Portland stone
might have built itself up into St. Paul's, and believing that the
Giant's Causeway may have come about by natural causes.

True, one must believe in a beginning somewhere, but science consists in
not believing the having reached that beginning before one is forced to
do so.

It is wholly impossible to prove that any phenomenon whatsoever is not
produced by the interposition of some unknown cause. But philosophy has
prospered exactly as it has disregarded such possibilities, and has
endeavoured to resolve every event by ordinary reasoning.

I do not exactly see the force of your argument that we are bound to
find fossil forms intermediate between men and monkeys in the Rocks.
Crocodiles are the highest reptiles as men are the highest mammals, but
we find nothing intermediate between CROCODILIA and LACERTILIA in the