Design and Natural Selection 491 



Mr Hobhouse has given us the valuable phrase " a niche of 

 organic opportunity." Such a phrase would have borne a different 

 sense in non-evolutionary thought. In that thought, the opportunity 

 was an opportunity for the Creative Power, and Design appeared in 

 the preparation of the organism to fit the niche. The idea of the 

 niche and its occupant growing together from simpler to more com- 

 plex mutual adjustment was unwelcome to this teleology. If the 

 adaptation was traced to the influence, through competition, of the 

 environment, the old teleology lost an illustration and a proof. For 

 the cogency of the proof in every instance depended upon the absence 

 of explanation. Where the process of adaptation was discerned, the 

 evidence of Purpose or Design was weak. It was strong only when 

 the natural antecedents were not discovered, strongest when they 

 could be declared undiscoverable. 



Paley's favourite word is " Contrivance " ; and for him contrivance 

 is most certain where production is most obscure. He points out the 

 physiological advantage of the valvulae conniventes to man, and the 

 advantage for teleology of the fact that they cannot have been formed 

 by "action and pressure." What is not due to pressure may be 

 attributed to design, and when a " mechanical " process more subtle 

 than pressure was suggested, the case for design was so far weakened. 

 The cumulative proof from the multitude of instances began to dis- 

 appear when, in selection, a natural sequence was suggested in which 

 all the adaptations might be reached by the motive power of life, and 

 especially when, as in Darwin's teaching, there was full recognition of 

 the reactions of life to the stimulus of circumstance. " The organism 

 fits the niche," said the teleologist, " because the Creator formed it 

 so as to fit." "The organism fits the niche," said the naturalist, 

 " because unless it fitted it could not exist." " It was fitted to sur- 

 vive," said the theologian. " It survives because it fits," said the 

 selectionist. The two forms of statement are not incompatible ; but 

 the new statement, by provision of an ideally universal explanation 

 of process, was hostile to a doctrine of purpose which relied upon 

 evidences always exceptional however numerous. Science persistently 

 presses on to find the universal machinery of adaptation in this planet ; 

 and whether this be found in selection, or in direct-effect, or in vital 

 reactions resulting in large changes, or in a combination of these and 

 other factors, it must always be opposed to the conception of a Divine 

 Power here and there but not everywhere active. 



For science, the Divine must be constant, operative everywhere 

 and in every quality and power, in environment and in organism, 

 in stimulus and in reaction, in variation and in struggle, in heredi- 

 tary equilibrium, and in "the unstable state of species"; equally 

 present on both sides of every strain, in all pressures and in all 



