44 PUBLICATION OF THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' [1859 



by law, and under what is called final causes, comprehends, I 

 think, your whole principle. You write of " natural selec- 

 tion " as if it were done consciously by the selecting agent. 

 'Tis but a consequence of the presupposed development, and 

 the subsequent battle for life. This view of nature you have 

 stated admirably, though admitted by all naturalists and de- 

 nied by no one of common sense. We all admit develop- 

 ment as a fact of history : but how came it about ? Here, in 

 language, and still more in logic, we are point-blank at issue. 

 There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well a 

 physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly. 

 'Tis the crown and glory of organic science that it does 

 through final cause, link material and moral ; and yet does 

 not allow us to mingle them in our first conception of laws, 

 and our classification of such laws, whether we consider one 

 side of nature or the other. You have ignored this link ; 

 and, if I do not mistake your meaning, you have done your 

 best in one or two pregnant cases to break it. Were it pos- 

 sible (which, thank God, it is not) to break it, humanity, in 

 my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and 

 sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than 

 any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of 

 its history. Take the case of the bee-cells. If your develop- 

 ment produced the successive modification of the bee and its 

 cells (which no mortal can prove), final cause would stand 

 good as the directing cause under which the successive gen- 

 erations acted and gradually improved. Passages in your 

 book, like that to which I have alluded (and there are others 

 almost as bad), greatly shocked my moral taste. I think, in 

 speculating on organic descent, you 0zw-state the evidence 

 of geology ; and that you under-state it while you are talk- 

 ing of the broken links of your natural pedigree : but my 

 paper is nearly done, and I must go to my lecture-room, 

 Lastly, then, I greatly dislike the concluding chapter not as 

 a summary, for in that light it appears good but I dislike it 

 from the tone of triumphant confidence in which you appeal 

 to the rising generation (in a tone I condemned in the au- 



