410 NATURAL SCIENCE [December 



are due, at least partly, to intelligent effort on somebody's part. 

 To make good this position, Professor Schiller has recourse to some- 

 what strained arguments. For instance, he suggests that " a com- 

 plete denial of design in nature must deny the efficacy of all 

 intelligence as such. ... If that view were true, we should have 

 to renounce all efforts to direct our fated and ill-fated course adown 

 the stream of time " (p. 868). But this ingenuous attempt to make 

 the anti-teleologist damn himself — on the plea that logically he is 

 bound to deny the efficacy of all intelligence if he deny the argu- 

 ment from design — seems to me a mere trifling with words, and 

 recalls the old saying that " words are wise men's counters, they do 

 but reckon with them; but they are the money of" metaphysicians. 

 Professor Schiller must know perfectly well that the " denial of de- 

 sign " is merely an elliptical phrase meaning the "denial that the 

 adaptations in nature evidence the design of an over-ruling Divine 

 intelligence " ; and that this denial, neither logically nor historically, 

 implies anything so absurd as the denial of " the efficacy of all in- 

 telligence " — such intelligence itself being regarded by consistent 

 evolutionists as a notable adaptation to our environment. But this 

 playing with words, this use of words in Humpty-Dumpty's port- 

 manteau fashion, so that two very different meanings are packed 

 into one word, is typical of Professor Schiller's article. Of this we 

 have a glaring example in the following passage, which is, to a 

 certain extent, the key to the author's position : — 



" The ease with which the Darwinian argument dispenses with 

 all intelligence as a factor in survival, excites suspicion. It is 

 proving too much to show that adaptation might equally well — i.e., 

 as completely, if not as rapidly — have arisen in automata. For 

 we know that we ourselves are not automata, and strive hard to 

 adapt ourselves. In us at least, therefore, intelligent effort 

 is a source of adaptation, and the same will surely be admitted 

 in the case of the higher animals. . . . Intelligence therefore is a 

 vera causa, as a source of adaptations, at least co-ordinate with 

 natural selection ; and this can be denied only if it is declared in- 

 efficacious everywhere — if all living beings, ourselves included, are 

 declared to be automata. ... If, however, intelligence is read- 

 mitted as a vera causa, there arises at least a possibility that other 

 intelligence besides that of the known living beings may have been 

 operative in the world's history" (p. 871 ; spaced type mine). 



It is worth while to realise the fallacy involved in this passage ; 

 for, when once that is realised, there is not much left in our author's 

 case. The whole fallacy lurks in that word adaptations. It is 

 obvious that individual animals do functionally adapt themselves 

 in many ways to their environment ; and that, the greater their in- 

 telligence, and the better consequently their adaptations, the greater 



