The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 83 



tion of the number of variations and the prede 

 termination of their character are conceptions 

 foreign, I believe, to Darwin s habitual mode of 

 thought, but they may now be considered tenets 

 of the school ; and Professor Asa Gray, adopting 

 categorically the suggestion of Professor Huxley, 

 declares, &quot;The facts, so far as lean judge, do 

 not support the assumption of every-sided and in 

 different variations.&quot; ^ -* 



The nature and the origin of the modifica 

 tions being described, we have next to fix atten 

 tion upon the process of their accumulation into 

 specific characters. It is the exhibition of this 

 process that constitutes the peculiar glory of Dar 

 winian science. And to science, certainly, as the 

 register of nature s operations, the whole subject 

 of natural selection properly belongs. But when 

 the designation for a purely natural process has, 

 through the suggestions of metaphor and the use 

 of capital letters, come to stand for something 

 more than a process, and, from constant association 

 with an extraneous metaphysics, has acquired the 

 potency of a conjurer s formula in the philoso 

 phy of life, mind, and conscience, it is high time 

 to set about the perennial problem of laying the 

 dust raised by dogmatic metaphysicians, who are 

 all the more insidious when they disown their 



