endowed with them.

As a question of dialectics, it must be admitted that this sort of
reasoning is not very formidable to those who are not to be frightened by
consequences. It is an _argumentum ad ignorantiam_--take this
explanation or be ignorant. But suppose we prefer to admit our ignorance
rather than adopt a hypothesis at variance with all the teachings of
Nature? Or, suppose for a moment we admit the explanation, and then
seriously ask ourselves how much the wiser are we; what does the
explanation explain? Is it any more than a grandiloquent way of announcing
the fact, that we really know nothing about the matter? A phenomenon is
explained when it is shown to be a case of some general law of Nature; but
the supernatural interposition of the Creator can, by the nature of the
case, exemplify no law, and if species have really arisen in this way, it
is absurd to attempt to discuss their origin.

Or, lastly, let us ask ourselves whether any amount of evidence which the
nature of our faculties permits us to attain, can justify us in asserting
that any phenomenon is out of the reach of natural causation. To this end
it is obviously necessary that we should know all the consequences to which
all possible combinations, continued through unlimited time, can give rise.
If we knew these, and found none competent to originate species, we should
have good ground for denying their origin by natural causation. Till we
know them, any hypothesis is better than one which involves us in such
miserable presumption.

But the hypothesis of special creation is not only a mere specious mask for
our ignorance; its existence in Biology marks the youth and imperfection of
the science. For what is the history of every science but the history of
the elimination of the notion of creative, or other interferences, with the