134 J. HOrKXN"SON — AIOnVEESARY ADDEESS. 



designed to fit them, for tliose which, did not fit these conditions 

 have perished in the struggle for existence ; but it nevertheless 

 requires the aid of some pre-ordained guiding or determining 

 principle, and that necessitates the existence of a Presiding 

 Intelligence. Nothing happens by chance ; everything must have 

 a cause ; and every cause must have a prior cause ; so we are 

 logically brought to see the necessary existence from eternity of a 

 Great First Cause, of infinite power and wisdom, who has decreed 

 the existence of matter and ordained the laws of force which 

 govern it. Even if we could ascertain the mode in which life 

 has been acquired by matter, and could see the quivering molecules 

 in the protoplasm of organised beings striving with each other, 

 some trying to pursue the course they have hitherto pursued, and 

 others trying to pursue a new course, so that we could actually 

 see Heredity and Variability striving for the mastery, we should 

 still have to account for the origin of this strife, which must have 

 been coeval with the origin of life, and for the determining 

 principle by which the progress from simplicity' to complexity is 

 a progress, through intellectual man, towards his conception of 

 the Supreme Intelligence. 



Darwin, while clearly seeing that variability may arise from 

 the movement and activity inherent in all life, vegetal and 

 animal, recognises the necessity of a determining principle, 

 when he says : " The birth both of the species and of the 

 individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events 

 which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance." 

 Again, alluding to the view, now no longer held, that each 

 species has been independently created, he remarks: "To my 

 mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed 

 on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction 

 of the past and jDresent inhabitants of the world should have 

 been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth 

 and death of the individual. When I view all beings, not as 

 special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few 

 beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian 

 system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. . . . 

 There is grandeur in this -vdew of life, with its several powers, 

 having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms 

 or into one," from which "endless forms most beautiful and 

 most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." 



Professor Huxley, also, in treating of the place which Man 

 occupies in Nature, says that "thoughtful men, once escaped 

 from the blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find 



