240 DARWIN1ANISM. 



least his own self. If he says he rejects, in consequence 

 of his own doctrine of natural selection, all that has been 

 understood, and is understood, as design, then it is not 

 for any other man to say the contrary. In fact, it is 

 impossible for any man who reads these three volumes 

 of the Life and Letters, not to see that it was the 

 one special pride of Mr. Darwin to think that he had 

 brought the organic world to the same level as the 

 inorganic world " now that the law of natural selection 

 has been discovered ! " This, too, is equally the pride of 

 many of his followers : natural selection has brought all 

 to the single uniformity of natural (that is, physical) law, 

 materialism. 



Now, I have no wish whatever to present the conse- 

 quences of a doctrine as refutation of that doctrine if 

 otherwise validly established as a doctrine. Though it 

 is so in mathematics that the reductio ad absurdum is 

 accomplished, " imputed consequences " have not always 

 any such consummation elsewhere. What alone I regard 

 here is truth and fact. Still, just in this name in the 

 name of truth and fact, it is a right that what doctrine 

 is now before us should be understood, not only in itself, 

 but in all that pertains to it. Now the end of the doc- 

 trine of natural selection the end of the thought; of Mr. 

 Darwin is only this matter and natural (mechanical) law 

 in matter. Beyond that Mr. Darwin cannot go. " It is 

 mere rubbish," he says (iii. 18), " thinking at present of the 

 origin of life ; one might as well think of the origin of 

 matter ; " " and as to the origin of matter (p. 236), I have 

 never troubled myself about such insoluble questions." 

 It is just possible that what is insoluble here, may not be 

 so insoluble elsewhere. But that does not concern us at 

 present. What we would point out now rather is this- 

 that what is implied as an objection to the theory of Mr. 

 Darwin, does not necessarily on that account in the 



