68 RELIGION. [ch. in. 



lieve that their first birth or production should be necessarily 

 designed." 



G. D. to W. Graham. Down, July 3d, 1881. 



Dear Sir, I hope you will not think it intrusive on 

 my part to thank you heartily for the pleasure which I have 

 derived from reading your admirably - written Creed of 

 Science, though I have not yet quite finished it, as now that 

 I am old I read very slowly. It is a very long time since 

 any other book has interested me so much. The work must 

 have cost you several years and much hard labour with full 

 leisure for work. You would not probably expect any one 

 fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects ; and 

 there are some points in your book which I cannot digest. 

 The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws 

 implies purpose. I cannot see this. Not to mention that 

 many expect that the several great laws will some day be 

 found to follow inevitably from some one single law, yet taking 

 the laws as we now know them, and look at the moon, where 

 the law of gravitation and no doubt of the conservation of 

 energy of the atomic theory, &c, &c, hold good, and I 

 cannot see that there is then necessarily any purpose. Would 

 there be purpose if the lowest organisms alone, destitute of 

 consciousness, existed in the moon ? But I have had no prac- 

 tice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Never- 

 theless you have expressed my inward conviction, though 

 far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the 

 Universe is not the result of chance.* But then with me the 

 horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's 

 mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower 

 animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any 

 one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are 

 any convictions in such a mind ? Secondly, I think that I 

 could make somewhat of a case against the enormous im- 



* The Duke of Argyll (Good Words, April 1885, p. 244) has recorded a 

 few words on this subject., spoken by my father in the last year of his life. 

 u . . . in the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference 

 to some of his own remarkable works on the Fertilisation, of Orchids, and 

 upon The Earthworms, and various other observations he made of the won- 

 derful contrivances for certain pui'poses in nature I said it was impossible to 

 look at these without seeing that they Avere the effect and the expression of 

 mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin's answer. He looked at me very 

 hard and said, ' Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; 

 but at other times,' and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ' it seems to go 

 away.' " 



