CRITICISMS ON " THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES " 179 



keep time, is a contriving intelligence adapting the means 

 directly to that end. 



Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show 

 that the watch had not been made directly by any person, 

 but that it was the result of the modification of another 

 watch which kept time but poorly ; and that this again had 

 proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a 

 watch at all seeing that it had no figures on the dial and 

 the hands were rudimentary ; and that going back and 

 back in time we came at last to a revolving barrel as the 

 earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And 

 imagine that it had been possible to show that all these 

 changes had resulted, first, from a tendency of the structure 

 to vary indefinitely ; and secondly, from something in 

 the surrounding world which helped all variations in the 

 direction of an accurate time-keeper, and checked all those 

 in other directions ; then it is obvious that the force of 

 Paley's argument would be gone. For it would be demon- 

 strated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a 

 particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial 

 and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the 

 direct application of the means appropriate to that end,, 

 by an intelligent agent. 



Now it appears to us that what we have here, for illustra- 

 tion's sake, supposed to be done with the watch, is exactly 

 what the establishment of Darwin's Theory will do for the 

 organic world. For the notion that every organism has 

 been created as it is and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. 

 Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may 

 fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms 

 vary incessantly ; of these variations the few meet with 

 surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive ; the 

 many are unsuited and become extinguished. 



According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet 

 fired straight at a mark ; according to Darwin, organisms 

 are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest 

 fall wide. 



For the teleologist an organism exists because it was 

 made for the conditions in which it is found ; for the 

 Darwinian an organism exists because, out of many of its 

 kind, it is the only one which has been able to persist in 

 the conditions in which it is found. 



Teleology implies that the organs of every organism are 

 perfect and cannot be improved ; the Darwinian theory 



