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CONCLUSION. 



In taking a retrospective glance over the subjects 

 treated of in these volumes, the author expresses his 

 adherence to and entire belief in the old, but now 

 often assailed doctrine of design. 



Mr. Darwin never taught that any blind condition 

 was involved in selection, though some modern writers 

 have illogically asserted that gradual evolution is 

 utterly fatal to the argument of teleology. It seems to 

 be inconsistent that these thinkers commonly use, and 

 apparently from necessity, such a phraseology as in- 

 volves a doctrine, the significance of which they would 

 otherwise deny. 



It is the duty of the man of science to push back 

 the sequence of cause and effect to the utmost attain- 

 able limits; but this process, whilst it enlarges the 

 area of the known, at the same time surely expands the 

 horizon, which at present cuts us off from the vast 

 region of the unseen ; for knowledge, like time, space, 

 and number, is to us only relative. It is difficult to 

 understand the position of that mind, which, whilst 

 continuously acknowledging the sequence of cause 

 and effect through a thousand instances, at the last 

 stage of thought seeks, and apparently finds, some sort 

 of relief in an inversion of this process, that is to say, 

 by putting the effect first. 



A denial of the Causa causarum invites back that 

 chaos and despair which would land intellect in the 

 monstrous dogma, that this universe after all is but a 

 mistake, and to man a hideous enigma, instead of being 

 the visible exponent of the Infinite. Carlyle thus 



