142 DARWINIAN A. 



But are not many individuals and some races of 

 men placed by the Creator " under unfavorable circum- 

 stances, at least under such as might be advantageously 

 modified ? " Surely these reviewers must be living in 

 an ideal world, surrounded by " the faultless monsters 

 which our world ne'er saw," in some elysium where 

 imperfection and distress were never heard of ! Such 

 arguments resemble some which we often hear against 

 the Bible, holding that book responsible as if it origi- 

 nated certain facts on the shady side of human nature 

 or the apparently darker lines of Providential dealing, 

 though the facts are facts of common observation and 

 have to be confronted upon any theory. 



The North American reviewer also has a world 

 of his own — just such a one as an idealizing philoso- 

 pher would be apt to devise — that is, full of sharp and 

 absolute distinctions : such, for instance, as the " abso- 

 lute invariableness of instinct ; " an absolute want of 

 intelligence in any brute animal; and a complete 

 monopoly of instinct by the brute animals, so that 

 this "instinct is a great matter" for them only, since 

 it sharply and perfectly distinguishes this portion of 

 organic Nature from the vegetable kingdom on the one 

 hand and from man on the other : most convenient 

 views for argumentative purposes, but we suppose not 

 borne out in fact. 



In their scientific objections the two reviewers take 

 somewhat different lines ; but their philosophical and 

 theological arguments strikingly coincide. They agree 

 in emphatically asserting that Darwin's hypothesis of 

 the origination of species through variation and natu- 

 ral selection " repudiates the whole doctrine of final 



