uch they purify, leave behind the essence of the original
belief.

Considered genealogically, the received theory respecting the creation
of the Solar System is unmistakably of low origin. You may clearly trace
it back to primitive mythologies. Its remotest ancestor is the doctrine
that the celestial bodies are personages who originally lived on the
Earth--a doctrine still held by some of the negroes Livingstone visited.
Science having divested the sun and planets of their divine
personalities, this old idea was succeeded by the idea which even Kepler
entertained, that the planets are guided in their courses by presiding
spirits: no longer themselves gods, they are still severally kept in
their orbits by gods. And when gravitation came to dispense with these
celestial steersmen, there was begotten a belief, less gross than its
parent, but partaking of the same essential nature, that the planets
were originally launched into their orbits by the Creator's hand.
Evidently, though much refined, the anthropomorphism of the current
hypothesis is inherited from the aboriginal anthropomorphism, which
described gods as a stronger order of men.

There is an antagonist hypothesis which does not propose to honour the
Unknown Power manifested in the Universe, by such titles as "The
Master-Builder," or "The Great Artificer;" but which regards this
Unknown Power as probably working after a method quite different from
that of human mechanics. And the genealogy of this hypothesis is as high
as that of the other is low. It is begotten by that ever-enlarging and
ever-strengthening belief in the presence of Law, which accumulated
experiences have gradually produced in the human mind. From generation
to generation Science has been proving uniformities of relation among
phenomena which were before thought either fortuitous or supernatural in
their origin--has been showing an established order and a constant
causation where ignorance had assumed irregularity and arbitrariness.
Each further discovery of Law has increased the presumption that Law is
everywhere conformed to. And hence, among other beliefs, has arisen the
belief that the Solar System originated, not by _manufacture_ but by
_evolution_. Besides its abstract parentage in those grand general
conceptions which Science has generated, this hypothesis has a concrete
parentage of the highest character. Based as it is on the law of
universal gravitation, it may claim for its remote proge