CH. xvii METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SELECTION 177 



There is indeed a different way of escape besides 

 the metaphysical shifting of the point of view. We 

 may address ourselves to old-fashioned teleology. 

 Keeping the idea of hard, repellent, individual things, 

 we may suppose that a designing and combining force, 

 external to themselves, crushes them together into a 

 unity. But such a philosophy is liable to be charged 

 with dualism. And not without reason ; it is quite 

 as mechanical, in its own way, as the logic of science. 

 Here once more two elements, which as the Germans 

 say "belong together," are made to fall asunder. The 

 material elements or forces, and the law of their com- 

 bination, are assigned to different quarters. Nature 

 has no tendency in itself towards life ; a Deistic God 

 outside of nature forces His thought of life upon alien 

 materials, as the human sculptor forces the design of 

 his brain upon the marble, which was fused in nature's 

 laboratory without any reference to the needs of artist 

 or artisan. Hence also it is clear why a system of 

 idealism, which tries to show that all things are related 

 together, and especially that design and materials 

 belong to each other, becomes suspected of pantheism. 

 There is undoubtedly a pantheistic strain in it. Are 

 we sure that there is not a pantheistic strain in the 

 truth and nature of things ? 



It is not any form of teleology, but, on the con- 

 trary, the purely and characteristically analytic pro- 

 cedure of science, that we seem to find in Darwin. 

 With him, natural selection is a biological hypothesis. 

 He proposes to account for all the different living 

 species from a few given elements (1) organisms, 

 multitudinous in number but simple in kind, distinct 

 from each other, hostile, competing for the prize of 

 survival ; (2) an environment in which life is possible ; 



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