244 DARWINIANISM. 



law, aboriginal principle, Mr. - Darwin will have none 

 such : he will have only a casual variation in an 

 organism, which, casually somehow also, is found to 

 involve connection with nature in an additional relation. 



Now, as we see, such an evolutionist as Charles 

 Kingsley has not the remotest dream of all this. He 

 believes in an original creation in the beginning and at 

 the first, to the simple evolution of which we owe the 

 innumerable species that now are. These, then, were 

 not separately created, but merely evolved. And as 

 Charles Kingsley was, it cannot be doubted that many 

 evolutionists still are. They have no suspicion that if 

 they are Darwinians their creed otherwise must simply 

 be, and cannot but be, as Mr. Darwin's own. Mr. 

 Darwin's own ! And that means that Mr. Darwin was 

 proud to think that, even as Sir Isaac Newton had 

 reduced to a single everyday natural necessity the whole 

 infinitude of the inanimate, so he, Charles Darwin, had 

 similarly reduced to a single everyday natural contin- 

 gency the whole infinitude of the animate itself. To 

 Newton there might be an innate law in the things 

 themselves, and to Newton there might be a God who 

 created the things themselves. But to Darwin neither 

 the one nor the other was a need. It may be right 

 to say "laic of natural selection;" if a constantly 

 recurring fact may be called a law the fact of limitless 

 natural variation, only, no less limitlessly, naturally 

 applied. Still it is the " undesigned," spontaneous, 

 unaccountable, mere mechanical consecution that con- 

 stitutes the fact, while it is the constancy of the process 

 that makes the law. And so it is that Mr. Darwin has 

 no need even of the innate law of Newton ; while as 

 for a God, the God of Newton, the God of Design, we 

 have already seen that Mr. Darwin almost directly says 

 instead (ii. 373), "my deity Natural Selection." 



