Primeval Man.
[Footnote 196]
[Footnote 186: Primeval Man. An Examination of some Recent Speculations. By the Duke of Argyll. New York: Routledge & Sons. 1869. 16mo, pp. 210.]
There are few more active or able members of the English House of Lords or of the British ministry than the Scottish Duke of Argyll, and, if we could forget the treason to the Stuarts and the Scottish nation of some of his ancestors, there are few scholars and scientific men in the United Kingdom whom we should be disposed to treat with greater respect. He is at once a statesman, a scientist, and a theologian; and in all three capacities has labored earnestly to serve his country and civilization. In politics, he is, of course, a whig, or, as is now said, a liberal; as a theologian, he belongs to the Kirk of Scotland, and may be regarded as a Calvinist; as a man of science, his aim appears to be to assert the freedom and independence of science, without compromising religion. His work on the Reign of Law, reviewed and sharply criticised in this magazine for February, 1868, was designed to combat the atheistic tendencies of modern scientific theories, by asserting final causes, and resolving the natural laws of the physicists into the direct and immediate will of God.
In the present work, quite too brief and sketchy, he treats of the primeval man, and maintains man's origin in the creative act of God, against the developmentists and natural selectionists, which is well, as far as it goes. He treats, also, of the antiquity of man, and of his primeval condition. He appears disposed to allow man a higher antiquity than we think the facts in the case warrant; but, though he dissents, to some extent, from the theory of the late Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, we find him combating with great success the savage theory of Sir John Lubbock, who maintains that man began in the lowest form of barbarism in which he can subsist as man, and has risen to his present state of civilization by his own spontaneous and unassisted efforts—a theory just now very generally adopted in the non-Catholic world, and assumed as the basis of the modern doctrine of progress—the absurdest doctrine that ever gained currency among educated men.
The noble duke very properly denies the origin of species in development, and the production of new species by "natural selection," as Darwin holds, and acceded to by Sir Charles Lyell and an able writer in The Quarterly for last April. The duke maintains that man was created man, not developed from a lower species, from the tadpole or monkey. But, while he asserts the origin of species in the creative act of God, he supposes God supplies extinct species by creating new species by successive creative acts; thus losing the unity of the creative act, placing multiplicity in the origin of things, and favoring that very atheistical tendency he aims to war against. His Reign of Law, though well-intended, and highly praised by our amiable friend, M. Augustin Cochin, of Le Correspondant, showed us that the noble author has failed both in his theology and philosophy. In resolving the natural laws into the will of God enforcing itself by power, he fails to recognize any distinction between first cause and second cause, and, therefore, between the natural and the supernatural. God does all, not only as first cause, or causa eminens, as say the theologians, but as the direct and immediate actor, which, of course, is pantheism, itself only a form of atheism. Yet we know not that his grace could have done better, with Calvinism for his theology, and the Scottish school, as finished by Sir William Hamilton, for his philosophy. To have thoroughly refuted the theories against which he honorably protests, he must have known Catholic theology, and the Christian view of the creative act.
We have no disposition, at present, to discuss the antiquity either of man or the globe. If the fact that God, in the beginning, created heaven and earth, and all things therein, visible and invisible, is admitted and maintained, we know not that we need, in the interest of orthodoxy, quarrel about the date when it was done. Time began with the externization of the divine creative act, and the universe has no relation beyond itself, except the relation of the creature to the creator. Considering the late date of the Incarnation, we are not disposed to assign man a very high antiquity, and no geological or historical facts are, as yet, established that require it for their explanation. We place little confidence in the hasty inductions of geologists.
But the primitive condition of man has for us a deeper interest; and we follow the noble duke with pleasure in his able refutation of the savage theory of Sir J. Lubbock. Sir John evidently holds the theory of development, and that man has been developed from a lower species. He assumes that his primitive human state was the lowest form of barbarism in which he can subsist as man. With regard to man's development from lower animals, it is enough to say that development cannot take place except where there are living germs to be developed, and can only unfold and bring out what is contained in them. But we find in man, even in the lowest form of savage life, elements, language or articulate speech, for instance, of which there are no germs to be found in the animal kingdom. We may dismiss that theory and assume at once that man was created, and created man. But was his condition in his primitive state that of the lowest form of barbarism? Is the savage the primitive man, or the degenerate man? The former is assumed in almost every scientific work we meet; it is defended by all the advocates of the modern doctrine that man is naturally progressive. Saint-Simon, in his Nouveau Christianisme, asserts that paradise is before us, not behind us; and even some who accept the Biblical history have advanced so little in harmonizing their faith with what they call their science, that they do not hesitate to suppose that man began his career, at least after the prevarication of Adam, in downright savagism. Even the learned Döllinger so far falls in with the modern theory as to make polished gentilism originate in disgusting fetichism.
The noble duke sufficiently refutes the theory of Sir John Lubbock, but does not seem to us to have fully grasped and refuted the assumptions on which it is founded. "His two main lines of argument," he says, (page 5,) "connect themselves with the two following propositions, which he undertakes to prove, First, that there are indications of progress even among savages; and second, that among civilized nations there are traces of barbarism."
The first proposition is not proved or provable. The characteristic of the savage is to be unprogressive. Some tribes may be more or less degraded than others. The American Indian ranks above the New Hollander; but, whether more or less degraded, we never find savages lifting themselves by their own efforts into even a comparatively civilized state. Niebuhr says there is no instance on record of a savage tribe having become a civilized people by its own spontaneous efforts; and Heeren remarks that the description of the tribes eastward of the Persian Gulf along the borders of the Indian Ocean, by the companions of Alexander, applies perfectly to them as we now find them. No germs of civilized life are to be found among them, or, if so, they are dead, not living germs, incapable of development. The savage is a thorough routinist, the slave of petrified customs and usages. He shows often great skill in constructing and managing his canoe, in making and ornamenting his bow or his war-club; but one generation never advances on its predecessor, and the new generation only reproduces the old. All the arts the savage has have come, as his ideas, to a stand-still. He is stern, sad, gloomy, as if oppressed by memory, and exhibits none of the joyousness or frolicsomeness which we might expect from his fresh young life, if he represented the infancy or childhood of the race, as pretended.
Even in what are called civilized heathen nations we find a continual deterioration, but no indication of progress in civilization, or in those elements which distinguish civilized from barbaric or savage life. Culture and polish may be the concomitants of civilization, but do not constitute it. The generations that built the pyramids, Babylon, Nineveh, Thebes, Rome, were superior to any of their successors. No subsequent Greek poet ever came up to Homer, and the oldest of the Vedas surpass the powers of the Indian people in any generation more recent than that which produced them. The Chinese cannot to-day produce new works to compare with those of Confucius. Where now are the once renowned nations of antiquity whose ships ploughed every sea, and whose armies made the earth tremble with their tread? Fallen, all have fallen, and remain only in their ruins, and the page of the historian or song of the bard. If these nations, so great and powerful, with many elements of a strong civilization, could not sustain themselves from falling into barbarism, how pretend that the lowest and most degraded savages can, without any foreign assistance, lift themselves into a civilized state?
The second proposition, that civilized nations retain traces of barbarism, proves nothing to the purpose. These traces, at most, prove only that the nations in which we detect them have passed through a state of barbarism, as we know modern nations have; not that barbarism was, in any form, the primitive condition of the race. It is not pretended that no savage tribe has ever been civilized; what is denied is, that the race began in the savage state, or that, if it had so begun, it could ever have risen by its own natural forces alone to civilization. There is no evidence that the cruel and bloody customs, traces of which we find in civilized nations, were those of the primeval man. The polished and cultivated Romans were more savage in their customs than the northern barbarians who overthrew their civilization, much to the relief of mankind. When the late Theodore Parker drew a picture of the New Zealander in order to describe Adam, he proceeded according to his theory of progress, but without a shadow of authority. We find a cruelty, an inhumanity, an oppression, bloody and obscene rites, among polished nations—as Rome, Syria, Phoenicia, and modern India—that we shall look in vain for among downright savages; which shows that we owe them to cultivation, to development, that is, to "development," as the noble duke well says, "in corruption."
But these traces of so-called barbarism among civilized nations are more than offset by remains of civilization which we find in savage tribes. Sir J. Lubbock and others take these remains as indications of progress among savages; but they mistake the evening twilight deepening into darkness, for that of the morning ushering in the day. This is evident from the fact that they are followed by no progress. They are reminiscences, not promises. If germs, they never germinate; but have been deprived of their vitality. To us, paganism bears witness in all its forms that it has degenerated from its normna, or type; not that it is advancing toward it. We see in its incoherence, its incongruities and inequalities, that it is a fall or departure from something higher, more living and more perfect. Any one studying Protestantism, in any of its forms, may see that it is not an original system of religion; that it is a departure from its type, not an approach to it; and, if we know well the Catholic Church, we see at once that in her is the type that Protestantism loses, corrupts, or travesties. So paganism bears unmistakable evidence of what we know from authentic history, that, whether with polished gentiles or with rude savages and barbarians, its type, from which it recedes, is the patriarchal religion. We know that it was an apostasy or falling away from that religion, the primitive religion of the race, as Protestantism is an apostasy or falling away from the Catholic Church. Protestantism, in the modern world, is what gentilism was in the ancient; and as gentilism is the religion of all savage or barbarian tribes, we have in Protestantism a key for explaining whatever is dark or obscure in their history. We see in Protestant nations a tendency to lose or throw off more and more of what they retained when they separated from the church, and which before the lapse of many generations, if not arrested, will lead them to a hopeless barbarism. The traces of Catholic faith we find in them are reminiscences, not prophecies.
We find with the lowest and most degraded savages, language, and often a language of great richness, singular beauty and expressiveness. Terms for which savages have no use may sometimes be wanting, but it is rare that the language cannot be made to supply them from its resources. In the poorest language of a savage tribe, there is always evidence of its having been the language of a people superior in ideas and culture to the present condition of those who speak it. Language, among savage tribes, we take to be always indicative of a lost state far above that of barbarism; and it not only refutes the theory of natural progress, but, as far as it goes, proves the doctrine of primitive instruction by the Creator, maintained by Dr. Whately, and only partially accepted by his Grace of Argyll.
Language is no human invention, nor the product of individual or social progress. It requires language to invent language, and there is no individual progress out of society, and no society is possible without language. Hence, animals may be gregarious, but not sociable. They do not, and never can, form society. Max Müller has disposed of the bow-wow theory, or the origin of language in the imitation of the cries of animals, and also of the theory that supposes it to originate in the imitation of the sounds of nature, as buzz, rattle, etc.; for if a few words could originate in this way, language itself could not, since there is much more in language than words. The more common theory, just now, and which has respectable names in its favor, is that God is indeed the author of language, but as causa eminens, as he is of all that nature does; that is, he does not directly teach man language, but creates him with the power or faculty of speaking, and making himself understood by articulate speech. But this theory will not bear examination.
Between language and the faculty of using it there is a difference, and no faculty creates its own object. The faculty of speaking could no more be exercised without language, than the faculty of seeing without a visible object. Where there is no language, the faculty is and must be inoperative. The error is in supposing that the faculty of using language is the faculty of creating language, which it cannot be; for, till the language is possessed and held in the mind, there is nothing for the faculty of speech to operate on or with. To have given man the faculty of speech, the Creator must have begun by teaching him language, or by infusing it with the meaning of its words into his mind. We misapprehend the very nature and office of language, if we suppose it can possibly be used except as learned from or taught by a teacher. Man, as second cause, can no more produce language than he can create something from nothing. If God made us as second causes capable of creating language, why can we not do it now, and master it without a long and painful study? Since the faculty must be the same in all men, why do not all men speak one and the same dialect?
We will suppose man had language from the first. But there is no language without discourse of reason. A parrot or a crow may be taught to pronounce single words, and even sentences, but it would be absurd to assert that either has the faculty of language. To have language and be able to use it, one must have knowledge, and the sense of the word must precede, or at least be simultaneous with the word. Both the word and its meaning must be associated in the mind. How then could the Creator give man the faculty of language, without imparting to him in some way the ideas and principles it is fitted to express, and without expressing which it cannot be language? He must do so, or there could be no verbum mentis, and the word would be spoken without meaning. Moreover, all language is profoundly philosophical, and conforms more nearly to the reality of things than any human system yet attained to, not only by savages, but by civilized and cultivated men; and whenever it deviates from that reality, it is when it has been corrupted by the false systems and methods of philosophers. In all languages, we find subject, predicate, and copula. The copula is always the verb to be, teaching those who understand it that nothing existing can be affirmed except by being and in its relation to being, that is God, who is QUI EST. Were ignorant savages able distinctly to recognize and embody in language the ideal formula, when no philosopher can ever apprehend and consider it unless represented to him in words? Impossible.
We take language, therefore, as a reminiscence among savages of a previous civilization, and a conclusive proof that, up to a certain point at least, the primeval man, as Dr. Whately maintains, was and must have been instructed by his Maker. As language is never known save as learned from a teacher, its existence among the lowest and most degraded barbarians is a proof that the primeval man was not, and could not have been an untutored savage. The Anglican archbishop, having, as the Scottish duke, no proper criterion of truth, may have included in the primitive instruction more than it actually contained. An error of this sort in an Anglican should surprise no one. Truth or sound philosophy from such a source would be the only thing to surprise us. We do not suppose Adam was directly instructed in all the mechanic arts, in the whole science and practice of agriculture, or in the entire management of flocks and herds, nor that he had steam-engines, spinning-jennies, power-looms, steamboats, railroads, locomotives, palace-cars, or even lightning telegraphs. We do not suppose that the race, in relation to the material order, received any direct instructions, except of the most elementary kind, or in matters of prime necessity, or high utility to his physical life and health. The ornamental arts, and other matters which do not exceed man's natural powers, may have been left to man to find out for himself, though we have instances recorded in which some of them were taught by direct inspiration, and many modern inventions are only the reproduction of arts once known, and subsequently lost or forgotten.
It is not difficult to explain how our modern advocates of progress have come to regard the savage as the primeval man, and not as the degenerate man. Their theory of natural progress demands it, and they have always shown great facility in accommodating their facts to their theories. They take also their starting-point in heathenism of comparatively recent origin, and study the law of human development in the history of gentilism. They forget that gentilism originated in an apostasy from the patriarchal or primitive moral and religious order, and that, from the first, there remained, and always has remained, on earth a people that did not apostatize, that remained faithful to tradition, to the primitive instruction and wisdom. They fail to consider that, language confounded and the race dispersed, those who remained nearest the original seats of civilization, and were separated by the least distance from the people that remained faithful, became the earliest civilized or polished gentile nations, and that those who wandered further into the wilderness—receding further and further from light, losing more and more of their original patrimony, cut off from all intercourse with civilization by distance, by difference of language, and to some extent, perhaps, by physical changes and convulsions of the globe, degenerated gradually into barbarians and savages. Occasionally, in the course of ages, some of these wandering and degenerate tribes were brought under the influence of civilization by the arts, the arms, and the religion of the more civilized gentile nations. But in none has the gentile civilization, in the proper sense of the term, ever risen above what the gentiles took with them from the primitive stock, when they apostatized. Protestant nations are below, not above, what they were at the epoch of the Reformation. The reformers were greatly superior to any of their successors.
But our philosophic historians take no account of these things, nor of the fact that history shows them no barbaric ancestors of the Egyptians, Indians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, Phoenicians, etc. They find, or think they find, from the Greek poets and traditions, that the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, each a comparatively modern people, were really savages, and that suffices them to prove that the savage state is the primeval state of the race! They find, also, that a marvellous progress in civilization, under Christianity has been effected, and what hinders them from concluding that man is naturally progressive, or that the savage is able, by his own efforts, to lift himself into civilized life? Have not the northern barbarians, who overthrew the Roman empire of the west, and seated themselves on its majestic ruins, become, under the teachings and the supernatural influences of the church, the great civilized nations of the modern world? How, then, pretend to deny that barbarians and savages can become civilized by their own spontaneous efforts and natural forces alone?
Whether any savage tribe was ever civilized under gentilism is, perhaps, doubtful; but if the philosophers of history would take the right line, instead of a collateral line or bastard branch of the human family, and follow it from Adam down, through the patriarchs, the synagogue, and the Catholic Church, they would find that there has always been a believing, a faithful, an enlightened, and a civilized people on earth, and they never would and never could have imagined any thing so untrue as that man began "in the lowest form of barbarism in which he can subsist as man." We have no indication of the existence of any savage or barbarous tribes before the flood; nor after the flood, till the confusion of language at Babel, and the consequent dispersion of the human race; that is, till after the gentile apostasy, of which they are one of the fruits. Adam, by his fall, lost communion with God, became darkened in his understanding, enfeebled in his will, and disordered in his appetites and passions; but he did not lose all his science, forget all his moral and religious instruction, and become a complete savage. Besides, his communion with God was renewed by repentance and faith in the promised Messiah, or incarnate Son of God, who should come to redeem the world, and enable man to fulfil his destiny, or attain his end.
We do not by any means deny progress. We believe in it with St. Paul, and struggle for it in individuals and in society. We only do not believe in progress or perfectibility by the simple forces of nature alone, or that man is naturally progressive. Existences have two movements or cycles: the one, their procession, by way of creation, from God as first cause; the other, their return, without absorption in him, to God as their final cause or beatitude, as we have on several occasions very fully shown. In the first cycle, man is explicated by natural generation, and his powers are determined by his nature, or the physical laws of his existence. In the second cycle, his explication is by regeneration, a supernatural act; and his progress is directed and controlled by the moral law prescribed by God as final cause, and is limited only by the infinite, to which he aspires, and, by the assistance of grace, may attain. The first cycle is initial, and in it there is no moral, religious, or social progress; there is only physical development and growth. It is under the natural laws of the physicists, who never look any further. The second cycle is teleological, and under the moral law, or the natural law of the theologians and the legists. In this teleological cycle lies the whole moral order, as distinguished from the physical; the whole of religion; its means, influences, and ends; and, consequently, civilization, in so far as it has any moral or religious character, aims, or tendency.
Civilization, we are aware, is a word that has hardly a fixed meaning, and is used vaguely, and in different senses. It is derived from a word signifying the city—in modern language, the state—and relates to the organization, constitution, and administration of the commonwealth or republic. It is used vaguely for the aggregate of the manners, customs, and usages of city life, and also for the principles and laws of a well ordered and well-governed civil society. We take it chiefly in the latter sense, and understand by it the supremacy of the moral order in secular life, the reign of law, or the subjection of the passions and turbulent elements of human nature in the individual, the family, and society to the moral law; or, briefly, the predominance of reason and justice over passion and caprice in the affairs of this world, and therefore coincident with liberty, as distinguished from license. The race began in civilization, because it began with a knowledge of the law of human existence, man's origin and destiny, and of the means and conditions of gaining the end for which he exists; and because he was placed in the outset by his Maker in possession of these means and conditions, so that he could not fail except through his own fault. Those who reject, neglect, or pervert the moral order, follow only the natural laws, separate from the communion of the faithful, and remain in the initial cycle, gradually become barbarians, superstitious, the slaves of their own passions, cruel and merciless savages, even if still cultivated, refined, and mild-mannered.
We place civilization, then, in the second cycle or movement of existences, under the moral law, and must do so or deny it all moral basis or moral character. What is not moral in its aims and tendencies, or is not in the order of man's return to God as his last end, we exclude from civilization, as no part of it, even if called by its name. There is no civilization where there is no state or civil polity; and there can be no state or civil polity, though there may be force, tyranny, and slavery, out of the moral order. The state lies in the moral or teleological order, and is under the moral law—the law prescribed by God as final cause. It derives all its principles from it, and is founded and governed by it. Its very mission is the maintenance of justice, freedom, and order; and, as far as it goes, to keep men's faces towards the end for which they are created. And hence the concord there is, or should be, between the state and the church.
Most of those things, it will be seen from this, after which the gentiles seek, and which the moderns call civilization, may be adjuncts of civilization, in the sense of our Lord, when he says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you;" but they do not constitute civilization, are not it, nor any part of it. Here is where modern gentilism errs, no less than did the ancient. Take up any of the leading journals of the day, and you will find what with great emphasis is called modern civilization is in the initial order, not the teleological; and is only a development and application of the natural laws of the physicists, not the natural or moral law of the theologians and legists. The press and popular orators called, a few years ago, Cyrus W. Field, who had taken a leading share in laying a submarine telegraph from the western coast of Ireland to the eastern coast of Newfoundland, a "second Messiah." When, after much urging and some threats, President Lincoln proclaimed, as a war measure, the emancipation of the slaves in certain States and parts of States then at war with the general government, the press and orators that approved, both at home and abroad, forthwith pronounced him also a "second Messiah," and without stopping to inquire whether the emancipation would be any thing more than the exchange of one form of compulsory physical labor for another, perhaps no better. Now, when a new Atlantic cable is laid from France to Massachusetts, we are told in flaring capitals and lofty periods that it is another and a glorious triumph of modern civilization—of mind over matter, man over nature. If our San Francisco friend succeeds in constructing an aerial ship, with which he can navigate the air, it will be a greater triumph still of modern civilization, and the theologians and moralists will have to hide their heads. All this shows that civilization, by the leaders of public opinion in our day, is placed wholly in the physical order, and consists in the development and application of the natural laws to the accomplishment of certain physical ends or purposes of utility only in the first cycle of our existence, and without the least moral significance. So completely have we become devoted to the improvement of our condition in the initial order, that we forget that life does not end with it, or that the initial exists only for the teleological, and that our development and application of the physical laws of nature imply no progress in civilization, or the realization of a moral ideal.
But whatever success we may have in developing and applying to our own purposes the physical laws of man and the globe he inhabits, we must remember that no success of that sort initiates us into the second cycle, or the life of our return to God. To enter that life we must be regenerated, and we can no more regenerate than we can generate ourselves. Here, we may see why even to civilization the Incarnation of the Word is necessary. The hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the divine person of the Word carries the creative act to its summit, completes the first cycle, and initiates the second, into which we can enter only as we are reborn of Christ, as we were born in the first cycle of Adam. Hence, Christ is called the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. Civilization, morality, salvation, are in one sense in the same order and under one and the same law.
Progress being possible, except in the sense of physical development, only in the movement of return to God as final cause, and that movement originating in the Incarnation only, it follows that those nations alone that are united to Christ by faith and love, either united to him who was to come, as were the patriarchs and the synagogue, before the Incarnation, or to him in the church or the regeneration, as are Catholics since, are or can be progressive, or even truly civilized nations. They who assert progress by our natural forces alone, confound the first cycle with the second, generation with regeneration, and the natural laws, which proceed from God as first cause, with the natural or moral law which is prescribed by God as final cause. It is a great mistake, then, to suppose, as many do, that the mysteries of faith, even the most recondite, have no practical bearing on the progress of men and nations, or that it is safe, in studying civilization, to take our point of departure in gentilism.
In accordance with our conclusion, we find that gentile nations, ancient or modern, are really unprogressive, save in the physical or initial order; which is of no account in the moral or teleological order. We deny not the achievements of Protestant nations in the physical order; but, in relation to the end for which man exists, they not only do not advance beyond what they took with them from the church, but are constantly deteriorating. They have lost the condition of moral and spiritual progress, individually and collectively, by losing communion with Christ in his church; they have lost Christ, in reality, if not in name; and by losing the infallible word preserved by the church alone, they have lost or are losing the state, civil authority itself, and finding themselves reduced to what St. Paul calls "the natural man." They place all their hopes in physical success, always certain to fail in the end, when pursued for its own sake.
We have raised and we raise here no question as to what God might have done, or how or with what powers he might have created man, had he chosen. We only take the plan he has chosen to adopt; and which, in his providence and grace, he carries out. In the present decree, as say the theologians, he has subjected the whole teleological order to one and the same law; and civilization, morality, and Christian sanctity are not separable in principle, and depend on one and the same fundamental law. Gentilism divorces religion and the state from morality; and modern heresy recognizes no intrinsic relation between them. It tells us religion is necessary to the stability of the political order; that Christianity is the basis of morality, and that it is the great agent of progress; but it shows us no reason why it is or should be so, and in its practical doctrine it teaches that it is not so. Every thing, as far as it informs us, depends on arbitrary appointment, and without any reason of being in the system of things which God has seen proper to create. Hence, people are unable to form to themselves any clear view of the relation of religion and morality, of morality and civilization, or to arrive at any satisfactory understanding of the purpose and law of human existence; and they either frame to themselves the wildest, the most fanciful, or the most absurd theories, or give the whole up in despair, sink into a state of utter indifference, and say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." They simply vegetate in vice or crime, or, at best, only take themselves to the study of the physical sciences, or the cultivation of the fine arts. We have shown that their difficulties and discouragements are imaginary, and arise from ignorance of the divine plan of creation, and the mutual relation and dependence of all its parts. One divine thought runs through the whole, and nothing does or can stand alone. We study things too much in their analysis, not enough in their synthesis.