318 THE GENESIS OF SPECIES. [CHAP. 



this harmony a mode of proceeding so different from that 

 of man as (the direct supernatural action eluding us) to 

 form a stumbling-block to many in the way of their 

 recognition of Divine action at all : although nothing can 

 be more inconsistent than to speak of the first cause as 

 utterly inscrutable and incomprehensible, and at the same 

 time to expect to find traces of a mode of action exactly 

 similar to our own. It is surely enough if the results 

 harmonize on the whole and preponderatingly with the 

 rational, moral, and aesthetic instincts of man. 



Mr. J. J. Murphy l has emphatically brought forward the 

 evidence of " intelligence" throughout organic nature. He 

 believes " that there is something in organic progress 

 which mere Natural Selection among spontaneous varia- 

 tions will not account for," and that "this something is 

 that organizing intelligence which guides the action of the 

 inorganic forces, and forms structures which neither Natural 

 Selection nor any other unintelligent agency could form." 



This intelligence, however, Mr. Murphy considers may 

 be unconscious, a conception which it is exceedingly dif- 

 ficult to understand, and which to many minds appears to 

 be a contradiction in terms ; the very first condition of an 

 intelligence being that, if it knows anything, it should at 

 least know its own existence. 



Surely the evidence from physical facts agrees well with 

 the overruling, concurrent action of God in the order of 

 nature ; which is no miraculous action, but the operation 

 of laws which owe their foundation, institution, and main- 

 tenance to an omniscient Creator of whose intelligence our 

 own is a feeble adumbration, inasmuch as it is created in 

 the " image and likeness " of its Maker. 



1 See " Habit and Intelligeuce," vol. i. p. 348. 



