And now let me ask,--Is it my ingenuity that has imposed upon these
structures the conclusion I have drawn from them?--have I so combined
them in my thought that they have become to me a plastic form, out of
which I draw a Crinoid, an Ophiuran, a Star-Fish, a Sea-Urchin, or a
Holothurian at will? or is this structural idea inherent in them all,
so that every observer who has a true insight into their organization
must find it written there? Had our scientific results anything to do
with our invention, every naturalist's conclusions would be colored
by his individual opinions; but when we find all naturalists
converging more and more towards each other, arriving, as their
knowledge increases, at exactly the same views, then we must believe
that these structures are the Creative Ideas in living reality. In
other words, so far as there is truth in them, our systems are what
they are, not because Aristotle, Linnaeus, Cuvier, or all the men who
ever studied Nature, have so thought and so expressed their thought,
but because God so thought and so expressed His thought in material
forms when He laid the plan of Creation, and when man himself existed
only in the intellectual conception of his Maker.
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