DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. 211 



The old argument from design in Nature as given by Paley, which formerly 

 seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been 

 discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a 

 bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a 

 door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic 

 beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind 

 blows.* 



An incidental allusion, in a letter of 1857,t shows that lie had 

 come to look upon a belief in design and a belief in natural se- 

 lection as alternatives, and mutually exclusive. But here Dar- 

 win began to realize the contradiction in which he was involved. 

 On the one side his theory was opposed to Paley's, on the other 

 it was saturated with teleology. " The endless beautiful adapta- 

 tions which we everywhere meet with, J the extreme difficulty, 

 or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonder- 

 ful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far 

 backward and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or 

 necessity," * the fact that " the mind refuses to look at this uni- 

 verse, being what it is, without having been designed " || — these 

 had to be set off against " the difficulty from the immense amoimt 

 of suffering," ^ and the a priori unlikelihood that an omniscient 

 Being should have willed the world as we know it. In 1860, the 

 year after the publication of the "Origin of Species," Darwin 

 had reached the stage of utter bewilderment : 



I grieve to say [he writes to Asa Gray] that I can not honestly go as far as 

 you do about design. I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. 

 I can not think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance ; and yet I 

 can not look at each separate thing as the result of design.^ 



And in an earlier letter of the same year he says : 



I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that 

 I can not see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of de- 

 sign and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in 

 the world. I can not persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God 

 would have designedly created the IchneumonidcB with the express intention of 

 their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play 

 with mice. Not believing this, T see no necessity in the belief that the eye was 

 expressly designed. On the other hand, I can not anyhow be contented to view 

 this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that 

 everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as 

 resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to 

 the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all sat- 

 isfies me.J 



Elsewhere he says of this suggestion, " I am aware it is not 

 logical with reference to an omniscient Deity." X 



* " Life and Letters," i, p. 2Y8. f i, P- 478. % i» P- 279. * i, p. 282. 



J i, p. 283. ^ i, p. 276. »'. P- 146. ;J; u, p. 105. % ii, p. 247. 



