314 



THE GJ-NEHIS OF SPECIES, 



[Chat. 



a being so small that a gemmule \vould be to it as large 

 as St. Paul's woulil be to us. 



Admitting then the existence of species, and of their 

 successive evolution, is there anything in these ideas 

 hostile to Christian belief? 



Writers such as Vogt and l^uchner will of course con- 

 tend that there is ; but naturalists, generally, assume that 

 God acts in and by the various laws of nature. And this 

 is equivalent to admitting the doctrine of "derivative 

 creation." With very few exceptions, none deny sucli 

 Divine concurrence. Even " design " and " purpose " are 

 recognized as quite compatible with evolution, and even 

 w^ith the special "nebular" and Darwinian forms of it. 

 Professor Huxley well says,^ " It is necessary to remark 

 that there is a wider teleology, which is not touched l>y 

 the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the 

 fundamental proposition of evolution." .... ''Theteleo- 

 logical and the mechanical views of nature are not neces- 

 sarily mutually exclusive ; on the contrary, the more 

 purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firndy does 

 he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which 

 all the phenomena of the universe are the conse(iuencos ; 

 and the more completely thereby is he at the mercy of the 

 teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this 

 primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to 

 evolve the phenomena of the universe."^ 



Professor Owen says, that natural evolution through 



^ See The Aaulemy for October 1869, No. 1, p. 13. 



- Professor Huxley goes ou to say that the mechanist may, in turn, 

 «leniand of tlie teleologist how the latter know.s it was so intendeil. To 

 thi.s it may he replied, he knows it as a necessary truth of reason deduceil 

 from his own primary intuitions, which intuitions cannot be tjnestionol 

 without absolute scci»tifism. 



