RELIGION. 309 



scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which 

 would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at 

 a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so 

 slow that I felt no distress. 



"Although I did not think much about the existence of 

 a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, 

 I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been 

 driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given 

 by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, 

 now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. 

 We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge 

 of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent 

 being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be 

 no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the 

 action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind 

 blows. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my 

 book on the ' Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants/ * 

 and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, 

 been answered. 



" But passing over the endless beautiful adaptations which 

 we everywhere meet with, it may be asked how can the gene- 

 rally beneficent arrangement of the world be accounted for ? 

 Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount 

 of suffering in the world, that they doubt, if we look to all 

 sentient beings, whether there is more of misery or of happi- 

 ness ; whether the world as a whole is a good or bad one. 



* My father asks whether we are shadow of reason can be assigned 

 to believe that the forms are pre- for the belief that variations, alike 

 ordained of the broken fragments in nature and the result of the same 

 of rock tumbled from a precipice general laws, which have been the 

 which are fitted together by man groundwork through natural selec- 

 to build his houses. If not, why tion of the formation of the most 

 should we believe that the varia- perfectly adapted animals in the 

 tions of domestic animals or plants world, man included,were intention- 

 are preordained for the sake of the ally and specially guided." ' The 

 breeder ? " But if we give up the Variation of Animals and Plants,' 

 principle in one case, ... no ist Edit. vol. ii. p. 431. F. D. 



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