DESIGN IN THE ORGANIC WORLD. 413 



tific basis, it gained a much more ready reception among un- 

 prejudiced thinkers than he had himself ventured to expect. 

 Many of us had been aheady prepared to entertain it favourably 

 by the plausible and in some respects forcible manner in 

 which a similar doctrine had been previously presented in the 

 " Vestiges of Creation ; " in reviewing which book, nearly forty 

 years ago, I expressed myself as fully concurring with its author in 

 regarding the idea of a continuous ascending succession, along which 

 the various races of plants and animals of the past and present 

 epochs, each of them adapted to its external conditions of 

 existence, have come into existence according to " laws " of 

 genetic descent, as a far higher expression of Creative Wisdom and 

 Power than that of special creations devised to meet each exigency 

 as it arose. 



Considered from this point of view, the Darwinian doctrine 

 of "evolution," even when based on "natural selection," seems 

 to me to have no other bearing. For it is simply a concise 

 expression of what is maintained to have been an orderly and 

 continuous succession of phenomena, referable to natural causes ; 

 and no more excludes the idea of moral agency, than does the 

 substitution of the idea of the continuous evolution of the inor- 

 ganic universe for that of the creation of that universe in its 

 present form. In the pursuit of biological as of physical science, 

 I most fully recognize the essential importance of keeping clear 

 of what are termed "final causes," or assumptions of purpose, 

 and of rigorously limiting our study to "physical causation." But 

 the question now before us, — whether the evidences of intelligent 

 design, which theology has hitherto recognized in the structure 

 of organized beings, are or are not any longer tenable, when 

 viewed under the new light thrown upon them by the Darwinian 

 lamp, is one which — though science has much to say upon it — 

 it is beyond the province of science to decide. Newton and 

 Laplace were both accused of atheism by their contemporaries 

 for setting up their own conceptions in the place of the action 

 of the Creator ; and you well know that the same charge has been 

 brought against Darwin. I shall endeavour to show you that in 

 his case, as in that of his great predecessors, the real result of his 

 scientific work has been to effect for biology what they are well 



