Xiii.] CRITICISMS CN " TUB ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 1 ' 303 



into clearer light the profound opposition between the 

 ordinary teleological, and the Darwinian, conception. 



Cats catch mice, small birds and. the like, very well. 

 Teleology tells us that they do so because they were 

 expressly constructed for so doing — that they are perfect 

 mousing apparatuses, so perfect and so delicately ad- 

 justed that no one of their organs could be altered, 

 without the change involving the alteration of all the 

 rest. Darwinism affirms, on the contrary, that there 

 was no express construction concerned in the matter; 

 but that anions: the multitudinous variations of the 

 Feline stock, many of which died out from want of 

 power to resist opposing influences, some, the cats, were 

 better fitted to catch mice than others, whence they 

 throve and persisted, in proportion to the advantage 

 over their fellows thus offered to them. 



Far from imagining that cats exist in order to catch 

 mice well, Darwinism supposes that cats exist because 

 they catch mice well — mousing being not the end, but 

 the condition, of their existence. And if the cat-type 

 has long persisted as we know it, the interpretation of 

 the fact upon Darwinian principles would be, not that 

 the cats have remained invariable, but that such varieties 

 as have incessantly occurred have been, on the whole, 

 less fitted to get on in the world than the existing 

 stock. 



If we apprehend the spirit of the " Origin of Species " 

 rightly, .then, nothing can be more entirely and abso- 

 lutely opposed to Teleology, as it is commonly under- 

 stood, than the Darwinian Theory. So far from being 

 a " Teleologist in the fullest sense of the word/' we 

 should deny that he is a Teleologist in the ordinary 

 sense at all ; and we should say that, apart from his 

 merits as a naturalist, he has rendered a most remarkable 

 service to philosophical thought by enabling the student 



