Yet there are some who appear to find it unreasonable and absurd that men should regard phenomena in a light not furnished by or deducible from the very phenomena themselves, although the men so regarding them avow that the light in which they do view them comes from quite another source.

It is as if a man, A, coming into B's room and finding there a butterfly, should insist that B had no right to believe that the butterfly had not flown in at the open window, inasmuch as there was nothing about the room or insect to lead to any other belief; while B can well sustain his right so to believe, he having met C, who told him he brought in the chrysalis and, having seen the insect emerge, took away the skin.
By a similarly narrow and incomplete view the assertion that human conceptions, such as "the vertebrate idea," &c., are ideas in the mind of God, is sometimes ridiculed; as if the assertors either on the one {257} hand pretended to some prodigious acuteness of mind--a far-reaching genius not possessed by most naturalists--or, on the other hand, as if they detected in the very phenomena furnishing such special conception evidences of Divine imaginings.

But let the idea of God, according to the highest conceptions of Christianity, be once accepted, and then it becomes simply a truism to say that the mind of the Deity contains all that is _good_ and _positive_ in the mind of man, _plus_, of course, an absolutely inconceivable infinity beyond.

That thus such human conceptions may, nay must, be asserted to be at the same time ideas in the Divine mind also, as every real and separate individual that has been, is, or shall be, is present to the same mind.

Nay, more, that such human conceptions are but faint and obscure adumbrations of corresponding ideas which exist in the mind of God in perfection and fulness.[262] The theist, having arrived at his theistic convictions from quite other sources than a consideration of zoological or botanical phenomena, {258} returns to the consideration of such phenomena and views them in a theistic light without of course asserting or implying that such light has been derived _from them_, or that there is an obligation of reason so to view them on the part of others who refuse to enter upon or to accept those other sources whence have been derived the theistic convictions of the theist.
But Mr.Darwin is not guilty of arguing against metaphysical ideas on physical grounds only, for he employs very distinctly metaphysical ones; namely, his conceptions of the nature and attributes of the First Cause.
But what conceptions does he offer us?
Nothing but that low anthropomorphism which, unfortunately, he so often seems to treat as the necessary result of Theism.