ch. xil] OCTOBER 1859, TO DECEMBER 1859. ; . ) 



through wide regions, of many related organic beings, &c. 

 &c.) I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. 

 Parts of it I admired greatly, parts I laughed at till my sides 

 were almost sore ; other parts I read with absolute sorrow, 

 because I think them utterly false and grievously mischiev- 

 ous. You have deserted after a start in that tram-road 

 of all solid physical truth the true method of induction, 

 and started us in machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop 

 "Wilkins's locomotive that was to sail with us to the moon. 

 Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions 

 which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then ex- 

 press them in the language and arrangement of philosophical 

 induction ? As to your grand principle natural selection 

 what is it but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, 

 primary facts? Development is a better word, because 

 more close to the cause of the fact ? For you do not deny 

 causation. I call (in the abstract) causation the will of God ; 

 and I can prove that He acts for the good of His creatures. 

 He also acts by laws which we can study and comprehend. 

 Acting by law, and under what is called final causes, compre- 

 hends, I think, your whole principle. You write of " natural 

 selection " as if it were done consciously by the selecting 

 agent. 'Tis but a consequence of the pre-supposed develop- 

 ment, and the subsequent battle for life. This view of 

 nature vou have stated admirablv, though admitted bv all 

 naturalists and denied by no one of common-sense. We all 

 admit development as a fact of history : but how came it 

 about ? Here, in language, and still more in logic, we are 

 point-blank at issue. There is a moral or metaphysical 

 part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies 

 this is deep in the mire of folly. 'Tis the crown and glory 

 of organic science that it does through final cause, link 

 material and moral ; and yet does not allow us to mingle 

 them in our first conception of laws, and our classification 

 of such laws, whether we consider one side of nature or the 

 other. You have ignored this link ; and, if I do not mis- 

 take your meaning, you have done your best in one or two 

 pregnant cases to break it. Were it possible (which, thank 

 God, it is not) to break it, humanity, in my mind, would 

 suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human 

 race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which 

 it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history. 

 Take the case of the bee-cells. If your development pro- 

 duced the successive modification of the bee and its cells 



