92 Limits to Both. 



it is assumed that natural selection accumulates, 

 too. &quot; It may metaphorically be said that natu 

 ral selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, 

 throughout the world, the slightest variations ; 

 rejecting those that are bad, preserving and add- 

 ing up all that are good.&quot; And since natural 

 selection is the name of an event that follows 

 from physical causes, the reader gets the impres 

 sion that the origin of species has at last been 

 referred to a system of purely natural causation. 

 But the true state of the case is very different. 

 No cause has been discovered for the origin of 

 those variations which, through inheritance, are 

 accumulated into specific characters ; and the 

 theist- who formerly believed in a supernatural 

 cause may hold to it still, if he only substitute 

 gradual for sudden creation. Do you say we 

 -need not postulate a transcendent cause ? Possi 

 bly not ; but there is nothing in Darwinism, in 

 the theory of natural selection, to take the func 

 tion assigned to that supernatural power. If 

 you refer the origination and accumulation of 

 variations to nature, it is not the nature known 

 to science, nature as a complex of phenomena 

 governed by physical laws, but the poet s 

 vision : 



