Excerpt from The Contemporary Review, Vol. 39: January-June, 1881

The denial of what is called The Supernatural is the same doc trine in another form. The connection may not be evident at first sight, but it arises from the fact that the human mind is really the type of the Supernatural. It would be well if this word were altogether banished from our vocabulary. It assumes that we know all that N stare contains, and that we can pronounce with certainty on what can and what cannot be found there. Or else it assumes that Nature is limited to purely physical agencies, and that our own mind is a power and agency wholly separate and distinct from these. There might indeed he no harm in this limitation of the word if it could be cousis tently adhered to in all the terms of any argument involving its use. We are all quite accustomed to think of Man as not belonging to Nature at all - as the one thing or Being which is contradistinguished from Nature. This is implied in the commonest use of language, as when we contrast the works of Man with the works of Nature. The same idea is almost unconsciously involved in language which is intended to be strictly philosophical, and in the most careful utterances of our most distinguished scientific men. Thus Professor Tyndall, in his Belfut address to the British Association, uses these words: Our earliest historic ancestors fell back also upon experience, but with this difference, that the particular experiences which furnished the weft and woof Of their theories were drawn, not from the study of Nature, but from what lay much closer to them - the observation of men. Here Man is especially contradistingnished from Nature; and accordingly we find in the next sentence that this idea is connected with the error of seeing ourselves - that is, the Supernatural in Nature. Their theories, the Professor goes on to say, accordingly took an anthropomorphic form. Further on, in the same addrm, the same antithesis is still more dis tinctly expressed, thus; If Mr. Darwin rejects the notion of creative power acting after human fashion, it certainly is not because he is unacquainted with the nnmherless exquisite adaptations on which the notions of a supernatural artificer is founded. Here we see that the idea of acting after human fashion is treated as synonymous with the idea of a supernatural artificer; and the same identification may be observed running throughout the language which is commonly employed to condemn Anthropomorphism and the Supernatural.

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