CHAP. XI.] AN EPISODE. 341 



in which he lives and for which he writes the age of &quot; experimental 

 philosophy,&quot; the very standpoint of which, its fundamental assumption, 

 is the universality of physical causation. This is so familiar to minds 

 bred in physical studies, that they rarely imagine that they may be 

 mistaken for disciples of Democritus, or for believers in &quot; the fortuitous 

 concourse of atoms,&quot; in the sense, at least, which theology has attached 

 to the phrase. 



&quot; I feel a little difficulty in replying to this criticism, 

 because I cannot bring myself to attribute to Mr. Wright 

 such a misapprehension either of my meaning or of that 

 of the school of Democritus as seems necessary to ex 

 plain it. 



&quot; I would willingly suppose that an obscurity of expression 

 on my part is alone to blame ; but in using the word acci 

 dentally I qualified it by the prefix so to speak. But even 

 had I not done so, I could not have imagined that any one 

 would think me unaware that the various phenomena which 

 we observe in nature have their respective phenomenal ante 

 cedents. It is extremely difficult to me to think that Mr. 

 Wright can suppose I held the opinion that the phenomena 

 of variation, &c., are not determined by definite physical 

 antecedents. Yet, if he does not so suppose, how can he 

 assert that when I use the expression accidentally I mean 

 anything antagonistic to physical causation ? 



&quot; On the other hand, Mr. Wright cannot suppose that the 

 old atheistic philosophy held events to be accidental in the 

 strict sense, for he knows very well that Democritus and 

 Empedocles and their school no more held phenomena to be 

 undetermined or unpreceded by other phenomena than do 

 their successors at the present day. 



&quot; My meaning, which I rashly imagined plain enough, was 

 that Mr. Darwin s theory might be so taken as to n 



J Design and 



oppose the conception of design in the same way as accid( - nt - 

 the old Ionian theory opposed that conception. That I 

 was fully justified in expressing such an opinion is, I con 

 ceive, plain, from the language employed by Mr. Darwin 

 himself. In his work on Animals and Plants under Domes 

 tication, Mr. Darwin considers the building of an edifice 



