ete difference in species between the
populations of any two epochs (neither of which suppositions has stood
the test of further inquiry), the author of this speculation based his
conclusion that the Creator had, so to speak, improved upon his
thoughts as time went on; and that, as each such amended scheme of
creation came up, the embodiment of the earlier divine thoughts was
swept away by a universal catastrophe, and an incarnation of the
improved ideas took its place. Only after the last such "wreck" thus
brought about, did the embodiment of a divine thought, in the shape of
the first man, make its appearance as the _ne plus ultra_ of the
cosmogonical process.

I imagine that Louis Agassiz, the genial backwoodsman of the science
of my young days, who did more to open out new tracks in the
scientific forest than most men, would have been much surprised to
learn that he was preaching the doctrine of the Cabbala, pure and
simple. According to this modification of Neoplatonism by contact with
Hebrew speculation, the divine essence is unknowable--without form or
attribute; but the interval between it and the world of sense is
filled by intelligible entities, which are nothing but the familiar
hypostatised abstractions of the realists. These have emanated, like
immense waves of light, from the divine centre, and, as ten
consecutive zones of Sephiroth, form the universe. The farther away
from the centre, the more the primitive light wanes, until the
periphery ends in those mere negations, darkness and evil, which are
the essence of matter. On this, the divine agency transmitted through
the Sephiroth operates after the fashion of the Aristotelian forms,
and, at first, produces the lowest of a series of worlds. After a
certain duration the primitive world is demolished and its fragments
used up in making a better; and this process is repeated, until at
length a final world, with man for its crown and finish, makes its
appearance. It is needless to trace the process of retrogressive
metamorphosis by which, through the agency of the Messiah, the steps
of the process of evolution here sketched are retraced. Sufficient has
been said to prove that the extremist realism current in the
philosophy of the thirteenth century can be fully matched by the
speculations of our own time.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] There is no exaggeration in this brief and summary view
of the Catholic cosmos. But it would be unfair to leave it