# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S186
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

186 Toward the Grounding of a New Physico-Theology.

worthy? If there is any truth at all in the belief that man is made in the image of God, then it is certainly no fault in an inquirer to attempt, with the help of his own mental operations, to draw nearer to the works of the divine understanding, to draw knowledge from the nature of his own soul in order the better to comprehend the infinite Intelligence from which he himself has his origin. Such a view might perhaps at first glance appear irreverent. But who is truly humble? The one who, in penetrating the mysteries of creation, casts them into a formula which he proudly calls "his own scientific system," or the one who, in that same inquiry, recognizes his glorious kinship with the Creator and, in deepest gratitude for so exalted a descent, strives to become the believing interpreter of the divine understanding, entering thereby into a communion with Him that is, by the laws of existence, not merely permitted but foreordained. I confess that this question, touching as it does the nature and grounding of our scientific classification, seems to me to be of the greatest importance, indeed of a far weightier significance than is commonly attached to it. If it can be shown that man did not invent this systematic order in nature but rather only discovered it; that these kinships and relations, which occur throughout the animal and vegetable world, stand in a spiritual, an ideal connection with the spirit of the Creator; that this plan of creation, which unveils itself to our highest knowledge, is not the product of the necessary workings of physical forces, but appears as the free conception of an almighty understanding, ripened in His thought before it revealed itself in tangible outward forms — in short: if we can demonstrate a deliberation that preceded the act of creation, then we have once and for all broken with the dismal theory that ever refers us only to the laws of matter, as though these were to give account of all the wonders of creation, and which leaves us, without God, to the mere uniform, unchangeable working of physical forces, which bind all things to their inevitable fate. I believe that our science has now attained that degree of perfection by means of which we may venture upon such an inquiry."

These noble and engaging reflections are placed by the celebrated author of the above work — who for a number of years has exchanged his European residence in Neuchâtel for that at Harvard University in Cambridge, near Boston, in Massachusetts — at the head of his investigations, and thereby marks, as we believe, a new epoch in the scientific consideration of organic nature; he steps forward as the champion of a new physico-theology, in a language reminiscent of Kepler's, Newton's, and Linnaeus's.

This, as noted above, has entirely vanished among us. After