nsities determined them in favour of aerial or terrestrial
existence. Others, by an inherent disposition to society and
civilisation, and by a stronger effort of volition, would become men.
These in time would restrict themselves to the use of their hind feet;
their tails would gradually rub off by sitting in their caves or huts as
soon as they arrived at a domesticated state; they would invent language
and the use of fire, with our present and hitherto imperfect system of
society. In the meantime, the _Fuci_ and _Algae_, with the Corallines and
Madrepores, would transform themselves into fish, and gradually
populate all the submarine portions of the globe.'[44]

Although the writers of this delicious drollery seem to have had Dr.
Erasmus Darwin only in view, they could not, we thus see, parody his
peculiar crotchets without hitting off not less neatly some of the
corresponding extravagances of both earlier and later expounders of
Nature. Nature is a phrase which, greatly to the confusion of those who
so employ it, is habitually used simultaneously in two quite opposite
senses, so as to denote at the same time both the agency in virtue of
whose action the universe exists, and likewise the universe itself which
results from that action. Nature, in either signification, becomes to a
great extent interpretable when the agency so designated is credited
with sufficient sense to foresee and to intend the results of its own
action. On that condition, although among the many unsolved problems she
may continue to present there will be some evidently lying beyond the
limits of human comprehension, there will be none running counter to
human reason. Except on that condition, the universe is not simply
uninterpretable, it is a bewildering assemblage of irreconcilable
certainties. Philosophy's choice lies between such patent truisms as
that there can be no force but living force, no _vis_ but _vis vivida_,
no _vis inertiae_ otherwise than metaphorically, and such blatant
falsisms as that inertness and exertion may coincide, unintelligence
generate intelligence, agency of whatsoever sort produce, merely by its
own act, and merely out of its own essence, other agency capable of
higher action than its own. Philosophy, when with these sets of
alternatives before her she deliberately chooses the latter, becomes
Scientific Atheism, all the varieties of which have one point in common,
resembling each other in their proneness to rush upon an