224 Miscellaneous. 



It would be superfluous to discuss in detail the arguments by which 

 Mr. Darwin attempts to explain the diversity among animals. Suffice 

 it to say that he has lost sight of the most striking of the features, 

 and the one which pervades the whole, namely, that there runs 

 throughout Nature unmistakeable evidence of thought, corresponding 

 to the mental operations of our own mind, and therefore intelligible 

 to us as thinking beings, and unaccountable on any other basis than 

 that they owe their existence to the working of intelligence ; and no 

 theory that overlooks this element can be true to Nature. 



There are naturalists who seem to look upon the idea of creation 

 (that is, a manifestation of an intellectual power by material means) 

 as a kind of bigotry, forgetting, no doubt, that whenever they carry 

 out a thought of their own, they do something akin to creating, 

 unless they look upon their own elucubrations as something in which 

 their individuality is not concerned, but arising without an interven- 

 tion of their mind, in consequence of the working of some " bundles 

 of forces " about which they know nothing themselves. And yet 

 such men are ready to admit that matter is omnipotent, and consider 

 a disbelief in the omnipotence of matter as tantamount to imbecility ; 

 for what is the assumed power of matter to produce all finite beings, 

 but omnipotence? And what is the outcry raised against those who 

 cannot admit it, but an insinuation that they are non compos 1 The 

 book of Mr. Darwin is free of all such uncharitable sentiments 

 towards his fellow-labourers in the field of science ; nevertheless his 

 mistake lies in a similar assumption, that the most complicated system 

 of combined thoughts can be the result of accidental causes ; for he 

 ought to know, as every physicist will concede, that all the influences 

 to which he would ascribe the origin of species are accidental in their 

 very nature, and he must know, as every naturalist familiar with the 

 modern progress of science does know, that the organized beings 

 which live now, and have lived in former geological periods, constitute 

 an organic whole, intelligibly and methodically combined in all its 

 parts. As a zoologist, he must know in particular, that the animal 

 kingdom is built upon four different plans of structure, that the 

 reproduction and growth of animals take place according to four 

 different modes of development, and that unless it is shown that these 

 four plans of structure and these four modes of development are 

 transmutable one into the other, no transmutation theory can account 

 for the origin of species. The fallacy of Mr. Darwin's theory of the 

 origin of species by means of natural selection may be traced in the 

 first few pages of his book, where he overlooks the difference between 

 the voluntary and deliberate acts of selection applied methodically 

 by man to the breeding of domesticated animals and the growing of 

 cultivated plants, and the chance influences which may affect animals 

 and plants in the state of nature. To call these influences " natural 

 selection " is a misnomer which will not alter the conditions under 

 which they may produce the desired results. Selection • implies 

 design ; the powers to which Darwin refers the origin of species can 

 design nothing. Selection is no doubt the essential principle on 

 which the raising of breeds is founded, and the subject of breeds is 



