66 WHAT IS DARWINISM? 



intelligent designer ; and second, that beauty 

 not being an advantage to its possessor in the 

 struggle for life, cannot be accounted for on the 

 principle of the survival of the fittest. The 

 Duke, he says, maintains that contrivance and 

 beauty indicate " the constant supervision and 

 interference of the Creator, and cannot possi- 

 bly be explained by the unassisted action of 

 any combination of laws. Now, Mr. Darwin's 

 work," he adds, " has for its main object to 

 show that all the phenomena of living things 

 — all their wonderful organs and complicated 

 structures, their infinite variety of form, size, 

 and color, their intricate and involved relations 

 to each other — may have been produced by 

 the action of a few general laws of the simplest 

 kind, laws which are in most cases mere state- 

 ments of admitted facts." (p. 265) Those laws 

 are those with which we are familiar : Hered- 

 ity, Variations, Over Production, Struggle for 

 Life, Survival of the Fittest. " It is probable," 

 he says, " that these primary facts or laws are 

 but results of the very nature of life, and of 

 the essential properties of organized and unor- 

 ganized matter. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his 

 ' First Principles ' and in his ' Biology,' has, I 

 think, made us able to understand how this may 



