# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S188
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

188 Toward the Grounding of a New Physico-Theology.

brates, the articulates, the mollusks, the radiates, and whose original uniformity in the arrangement of the eggs can never be explained by the action of thoughtless forces, but rather presuppose a supreme Intelligence as the author of all these beings. We are led — the author argues further — since these relations reach back into the very oldest epochs of animal life on our planet, necessarily to the assumption of original ideas according to which the whole animal kingdom was formed. This view is reinforced by the fact that between animals and plants various degrees of kinship exist which have not the remotest genealogical connection, which live in the most widely separated parts of the globe, and which occur in geological periods entirely separated from one another. The gradual appearance, too, of quite different forms of beings, of which man appears as the culmination, must appear as an important fact in favor of a purposeful creation.

All the individual propositions which we have singled out are specified in the following sections of the voluminous work and supported for the main question with numerous examples. A closer look into the geographic distribution — where we cannot follow the author — gives particular occasion for this, as, for example, especially the consideration of the character of New Holland, so remarkable in this respect.

How slight an influence external physical effects have on the species of the animal world is shown by the fact that, for example, the animals embalmed in the graves of the ancient Egyptians show not the slightest difference from the individuals of the same species still occurring there today.

In this way the author now proceeds to institute new series of investigations, which he, as with the earlier ones, finally brings, in a general recapitulation, into individual propositions, of which we wish to cite the most important still further. Throughout these propositions it is set forth as the main result that all these phenomena would be wholly impossible without preconceived divine thoughts, without antecedent deliberation, without foreknowledge, without omniscience. There must be a creative, deliberating — that is, thought-forming — wisdom, wholly independent of the influences of the material world. Among the further phenomena which are adduced as evidence, the following in particular deserve special attention.

Here belong the series of metamorphoses which animals pass through during their growth; likewise the unequal limitation of the lifespan of individuals of different animal species; for, however varied or however uniform the conditions of existence may be under which animals live among one another, the mean lifespan is nevertheless fixed within the various ages, though unequally bounded. This presupposes a knowledge of time and space, of the value of time; for evidently the life-phases of individual animals are ordered according to the share which they occupy on the stage of the world.