Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

[384] detest them, because I think them untrue. They shut out all argument from design and all notion of a Creative Providence, and in so doing they appear to me to deprive physiology of its life and strength, and language of its beauty and meaning. I am as much offended in taste by the turgid mystical bombast of Geoffroy as I am disgusted by his cold and irrational materialism. When men of his school talk of the elective affinity of organic types, I hear a jargon I cannot comprehend, and I turn from it in disgust; and when they talk of spontaneous generation and transmutation of species, they seem to me to try nature by an hypothesis, and not to try their hypothesis by nature. Where are their facts on which to form an inductive truth? I deny their starting condition. ‘Oh! but’ they reply, ‘we have progressive development in geology.’ Now, I allow (as all geologists must do) a kind of progressive development. For example, the first fish are below the reptiles; and the first reptiles older than man. I say, we have successive forms of animal life adapted to successive conditions (so far, proving design), and not derived in natural succession in the ordinary way of generation. But if no single fact in actual nature allows