The whole train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are, then, to be regarded as a series of advances… - Robert Chambers

The evidence of the existence of other astral systems besides our own is much more decided than might be expected when we consider that the nearest of them must needs be placed at a mighty interval beyond our own.

Phenomena appear, in a word, to be explicable on the ground of development. We have already seen that various leading animal forms represent stages in the embryotic progress of the highest—the human being. Our brain goes through the various stages of a fish's, a reptile's, and a mammifer's brain, and finally becomes human.

We advance from law to the cause of law, and ask, What is that? Whence have come all these beautiful regulations? Here science leaves us, but only to conclude, from other grounds, that there is a First Cause to which all others are secondary and ministrative, a primitive almighty will, of which these laws are merely the mandates. That great Being, who shall say where is his dwelling-place or what his history! Man pauses breathless at the contemplation of a subject so much above his finite faculties, and only can wonder and adore!