S. Laing

“ But in all these various and discordant myths of the creation of man, it is evident there is nothing which comes within a hundred miles of being a possible historical reminiscence of anything that actually occurred; and they must be relegated to the same place as the corresponding myths of the creation of the animal world and of the universe. They are neither more or less credible than the theories that the earth is a great tortoise floating on the water, or the sky a crystal dome with windows in it to let down the rain, and stars hung from it like lamps to illuminate a tea-garden. ”

“ Geology is the true historian of the earth. Conducted by the lights it affords, we see an eternity of ages has rolled before us; we discover a series of worlds rising through the depths of ocean from the central sphere of heat, amidst boiling floods and volcanic fires, each new platform of existence, that countless periods of time had been requisite to form, peopled with its own congenial forms of organic life, mostly commencing with the simpler, and ascending by almost imperceptible gradations to the higher and more complex structures of being. ”

“ Tennyson, the great poet of modern thought, who sums up so many of the ideas and tendencies of the age in concise and vigorous verse, writes:—
For woman is not undeveloped man,
Nor yet man’s opposite. Not opposite, yet different, so that the one supplements what is wanting to the other, and the harmonious union of the two makes ideal perfection. It is the glory of European civilisation to have done so much to develop this idea of the equality of the sexes, and to have gone so far towards emancipating the weaker half of the human species from the tyranny of the stronger half. ”

“ Music especially seems made to be the language of religion. Not only its beauty and harmony, but its vagueness, and its power of exciting the imagination and stirring the feelings, without anything definite which has to be proved and can be contradicted, fit it to be the interpreter of those emotions and aspirations which fill the human soul in presence of the universe and of the Great Unknown. ”

“ How after wards came this unformed mass to be like our earth, to be covered with motion and organization, with life and general felicity? What primitive cause stocked it with plants and animals, and produced all the surprising and subtle contrivances which we find in their structure, all the wide and profound mutual dependence which we trace in their economy? Is it possible to conceive, as the Vestiges inculcate, that man, with his sentiment and intellect, his powers and passions, his will and conscience, were also produced as the ultimate result of vapourous condensation? ”

“ When do we say we know a thing? Not when we know its essence and primary origin, for of these the wisest philosopher is as ignorant as the rudest savage; but when we know its place in the universe, its relation to other things, and can fit it in to that harmonious sequence of events which is summed up in what are called Laws of Nature. The highest knowledge is when we can trace it up to its earliest origin from existing matter and energy, and follow it downwards so as to be able to predict its results. ”

“ Empires rise and fall, old civilizations disappear, old creeds become incredible, and often, for a time, the course of humanity seems to be 112 retrograde. But as the flowing tide rises, though the successive waves on the shore advance and recede, evolution, or the law of progress, in the long run prevails, and amidst the many oscillations of temporary conditions, carries the human race ever upwards towards higher things. ”

“ It is the great glory of Darwin to have established this firmly by an immense number of interesting and exhaustive instances, and thus placed evolution, or a scientific explanation of the development and laws of life, on a solid basis. Every day fresh discoveries and experiments confirm this great principle, and it has almost passed into the same phase as Newton’s law of gravity, as a fundamental law accepted as axiomatic by all men of science, and as the basis of modern thought, to which all religions and philosophies have to conform, accepted by nearly all modern thinkers. ”

“ Why should not common sense equally step in, and say of the narrative of the Garden of Eden with its trees of Knowledge and of Life, that here is an obvious allegory, stating the problem which has perplexed so many generations of men, of the origin of evil, man's dual nature, and how to reconcile the fact of the existence of sin and suffering with the theory of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator? ”

“ GENERAL CONCLUSIONS ON THE VESTIGES. The heavens are wonderful, and the earth is wonderful, and man, who, by force of intellect, has sought to comprehend the immensity of one and unravel the formation of the other, is hardly less wonderful than either. Still the great mystery remains unriddled; our researches have brought us no nearer the beginning, and the first cause of all continues unapproachable and undefinable as ever. Instead of explaining physical creation, we begin with it ”

“ What is education? The word tells its own story; it is to draw out, not to cram in; to unfold the capacities of the growing mind, strengthen the reasoning faculty, create an interest in the surrounding universe; in a word, to excite a love of knowledge and impart the means of acquiring it. For the mass of the population, education is necessarily confined in a great measure to the latter object. ”

“ It rarely happens that speculative inquiries in England command much attention, and the Vestiges of Creation would have probably formed no exception, had it not been from the unusual ability with which the work has been executed. The subject investigated is one of vast, almost universal, interest; for everyone—the low, in common with the high in intellect—find enigmas in creation that they would gladly have unriddled, and promptly gather round the oracle who has boldly stepped forth to cut the knot of their perplexities. ”

“ The Sun was born or rose into the upper world every morning, waxed in strength and glory as his bark navigated the upper waters until noon, then declined and finally sank into the nether world or died, slain by an envious Typhon, but to be born again next morning after traversing the perils and encountering the demons of the realm of darkness. ”

“ But a sensation from sight often calls up a multitude of ideas. Suppose you see the face of one with whom some fifty years ago you may have had some youthful love passages, but your lives drifted apart, and you now meet for the first time after these long years, how many ideas will crowd on the mind, how many nerve-cells will be set vibrating, and how many nerve-currents set coursing along intricate paths! ”

“ Thus, in the sublime chronology to which we are directing our inquiries, we first find ourselves called upon to consider the globe which we inhabit as a child of the sun, elder than Venus and her younger brother Mercury, but posterior in date of birth to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; next to regard our whole system as probably of recent formation in comparison with many of the stars of our firmament. We must, however, be on our guard against supposing the earth as a recent globe in our ordinary conceptions of time. ”

“ If we admit a Trinity of Father, 115 Mother, and Son, why not admit a daughter and other descendants; or if you personify the Power to make a universe, the Knowledge how to make it, and the Will to do it, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, why not the Benevolence to do it well, the Malevolence to do it badly, and a hundred other attributes which metaphysical ingenuity can devise to account for the complication of the known, and the mysteries of the unknown facts of existence? ”