ADAPTIVENESS AND PURPOSIVENESS 825 



§ 2. Their OHgin neither by Design nor Mechanical 



Opposite the title-page of Darwin's Oricjin of Species, 

 there is a quotation from one of the Bridgewater Treatises. 

 A judicious quotation it is, but, as Professor Lovejoy points 

 out, there is a historic irony in finding it at the outset of 

 a book which was the death-sentence of the kind of ariru- 

 ment most characteristic of the treatises in question. Darwin 

 sought to show that, if copious variability be granted and 

 abundance of time be allowed, then Nature's sifting — the 

 process of Natural Selection — will account for all the strik- 

 ing adaptations from which many thoughtful observers had 

 been wont to argue directly to theism. He says himself: 

 " The old argument from design in nature . . . which 

 once 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 hj 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." 



Now we cannot return to any crude form of the old idea 

 that the thousand and one adaptations of organisms, which 

 gratify our sense of fitness, are the direct outcome of the 

 design of a divine artificer. It is agreed that they have 

 been more or less gradually evolved by the operation of 

 natural factors. They have been wrought out in what is 

 often called Nature's w^orkshop. 



On the other hand, we cannot accept Darwin's statement 

 that the evolution of adaptations is comparable to the work 

 of the wind among the snow-drifts. The inadequacy of the 

 statement is fourfold. 



