The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 93 



* Of something far more deeply interfused, 

 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

 And the round ocean, and the living air, 

 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 

 A motion and a spirit that impels 

 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 

 And rolls through all things.&quot; 



But this conception of nature, however true, 

 is foreign to that system of efficient causes with 

 which alone scientific explanation is concerned. 

 If the scientist, in poetic exaltation, feels with 

 Pope that &quot; God and nature only are the same,&quot; 

 or with Goethe that &quot; nature is the living garment 

 of God,&quot; he may speak of the variations out of 

 which specific characters are built up as having 

 natural causes, but he then uses the word &quot; natu 

 ral &quot; much in the same sense as ordinary people 

 attach to &quot;supernatural.&quot; But the naturalist 

 who recognizes the limits of science will have to 

 confess that variations come in organisms we 

 know not whence, and are accumulated we know 

 not how (though we name the processes varia 

 bility and inheritance), and that natural selection 

 is only a designation for an event as simple as 

 this that beings with the most serviceable va 

 riations survive in the struggle for existence. 

 Natural selection is not a power, scarcely even a 



