Cn. XIL] OCTOBER 1859, TO DECEMBER 1859. 217 



because more close to the cause of the fact ? For you do not 

 deny causation. I call (in the abstract) causation the will of 

 God ; and I can prove that He acts for the good of His creatures. 

 He also acts by laws which we can study and comprehend. 

 Acting by law, and under what is called final causes, compre- 

 hends, I think, your whole principle. You write of " natural 

 selection * as if it were done consciously by the selecting agent. 

 'Tis but a consequence of the pre-supposed development, and 

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

 stated admirably, though admitted by all naturalists and denied 

 by no one of common-sense. We all admit development 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 as 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 classifica- 

 tion 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 possible (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 Bince its 

 written records tell us of its history. Take the case of the bee- 

 cells. If your development produced the successive modifica- 

 tion of the bee and its cells (which no mortal can prove), final 

 cause would stand good as the directing cause under which the 

 successive generations 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 over-state the 

 evidence of geology; and that you wwcZer-state it while you 

 are talking 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 author of 

 the Vestiges) and prophesy of things not yet in the womb of 

 time, nor (if we are to trust the accumulated experience of 

 human sense and the inferences of its logic) ever likely to be 

 found anywhere but in the fertile womb of man's imagination. 

 And now to say a word about a son of a monkey and an old 



