142 DARWINIANA. 



But are not many individuals and some races of 

 men placed by the Creator " under unfavorable circum- 

 stances, at least under such as might be advantageously 

 modified ? " Surely these reviewers must be living in 

 an ideal world, surrounded by " the faultless monsters 

 which our world ne'er saw," in some elysium where 

 imperfection and distress were never heard of ! Such 

 arguments resemble some which we often hear against 

 the Bible, holding that book responsible as if it origi- 

 nated certain facts on the shady side of human nature 

 or the apparently darker lines of Providential dealing, 

 though the facts are facts of common observation and 

 have to*be confronted upon any theory. 



The North American reviewer also has a world 

 of his own just such a one as an idealizing philoso- 

 pher would be apt to devise that is, full of sharp and 

 absolute distinctions : such, for instance, as the " abso- 

 lute invariableness of instinct ; " an absolute want of 

 intelligence in any brute animal; and a complete 

 monopoly of instinct by the brute animals, so that 

 this " instinct is a great matter " for them only, since 

 it sharply and perfectly distinguishes this portion of 

 organic Nature from the vegetable kingdom on the one 

 hand and from man on the other : most convenient 

 views for argumentative purposes, but we suppose not 

 borne out in fact. 



In their scientific objections the two reviewers take 

 somewhat different lines ; but their philosophical and 

 theological arguments strikingly coincide. They agree 

 in emphatically asserting that Darwin's hypothesis of 

 the origination of species through variation and natu- 

 ral selection " repudiates the whole doctrine of final 



