1866. | Darwin and his Teachings. 150 
understood that we have no ambition to be reckoned among his 
censors ; but whilst we admit his right of free speech, and applaud 
his fearless exercise of it, we feel quite justified, without rendering 
ourselves subject to the imputation of disrespect towards a great 
thinker and (judging from his works) a good man, in handling bis 
dogmas without ceremony or reservation. 
Whilst it is impossible not to perceive in his writings the dic- 
tates of a heart naturally reverential towards God and full of sym- 
pathy for his fellow-men,* there can be no doubt that the general 
body of his readers, whether lay or clerical, scientific or popular, 
must necessarily have received the impression that he endeavours 
to force the Deity out of sight, and to endow “ Natural Selection” 
with Omnipotence and Omniscience. Take, for example, the fol- 
lowing sentences from among many similar ones, which may be 
found even in the later and corrected edition of his work on the 
‘Origin of Species :’ 
“ As man can produce, and certainly has produced a great result 
by his methodical and unconscious means of Selection, what may 
not Natural Selection effect? Man can act only on external and 
visible characters; Nature (¢f I may be allowed thus to personify 
the natural preservation of varying and favoured individuals 
during the struggle for existence) cares nothing for appearances, 
except in so far as they are useful to any beng. She can act on 
every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on 
the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good— 
Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected 
character is fully exercised by her, and the being is placed under 
well-suited conditions of life.”t 
In the earlier editions, the word “ Nature” stood for “ Natural 
Selection,” underlined in the foregoing extract, and the italicised 
sentence, intended to be explanatory of the latter term, was omitted 
altogether. Here, and in many other parts of his work, where the 
desire for “brevity” cannot be pleaded as an excuse, the author 
manifestly endows “ Nature” with the intelligent faculty of design- 
ing and planning, and when it is remembered how rapidly (often 
indeed too rapidly) public criticism now follows the publication of 
new works ; how these are devowred on their first appearance by 
literary gourmands before they can be carefully digested by expe- 
rienced and thoughtful men of science, it will be clear that the new 
doctrine of Darwin must have borne with it an element far more 
antagonistic to its own universal acceptance than any that have since 
been associated with it by the more impetuous and indiscreet of 
* See his ‘ Naturalist’s Voyage round the World’ (tenth edition, Murray, 1860), 
pp. 158, 500, 503; ‘Origin of Species,’ pp. 515, 525; ‘On the Contrivances by 
which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilized by Insects’ (Murray), p. 2. 
+ ‘Origin of Species,’ p. 87. 
mM 2 
