672 ON FOEM AND MECHANICAL EFFICIENCY [ch. 



had brown spots over his eyes that he might seem awake when he 

 was sleeping * : so that an enemy might let the sleeping dog lie, 

 for the singular reason that he imagined him to be awake. And 

 a flock of flamingos, wearing on rosy breast and crimson wings 

 a garment of invisibihty, fades away into the sky at dawn or 

 sunset Uke a cloud incarnadine f. 



To buttress the theory of natural selection the same instances 

 of "adaptation" (and many more) are used, which in an earher 

 but not distant age testified to the wisdom of the Creator and 

 revealed to simple piety the high purpose of God. In the words 

 of a certain learned theologian J, "The free use of final causes to 

 explain what seems obscure was temptingly easy.... Hence the 

 finahst was often the man who made a liberal use of the ignava 

 ratio, or lazy argument: when you failed to explain a thing by 

 the ordinary process of causahty, you could "explain" it by 

 reference to some purpose of nature or of its Creator. This method 

 lent itself with dangerous facihty to the well-meant endeavours 

 of the older theologians to expound and emphasise the beneficence 

 of the divine purpose." Mutatis mutandis, the passage carries 

 its plain message to the uaturahst. 



The fate of such arguments or illustrations is always the same. 

 They attract and captivate for awhile; they go to the building 

 of a creed, which contemporary orthodoxy defends under its 

 severest penalties : but the time comes when they lose their 

 fascination, they somehow cease to satisfy and to convince, their 

 foundations are discovered to be insecure, and in the end no man 

 troubles to controvert them. 



But of a very different order from all such "adaptations" as 

 these, are those very perfect adaptations of form which, for 

 instance, fit a fish for swimming or a bird for flight. Here we are 



* Nature, l, p. 572; li, pp. 33, 57, 533, 1894-95. 



f They are "wonderfully fitted for 'vanishment' against the flushed, rich- 

 coloured skies of early morning and evening.... their chief feeding-times"; and 

 "look like a real sunset or dawn, repeated on the opposite side of the heavens, — 

 either east or west as the case may be": Thayer, Concealing -coloration in the 

 Animal Kingdom, New York, 1909, pp. 154-155. This hypothesis, like the rest, 

 is not free from difficulty. Twilight is apt to be short in the homes of the flamingo : 

 and moreover. Mr Abel Chapman, who watched them on the Guadalquivir, tells 

 us that they feed by day. 



% Principal Galloway, Philosophy of Religion, p. 344, 1914. 



