Postulates of Evolution. 131 



mist cloud. We may with as much warrant take for 

 granted repeated interventions of the absolute energy. 

 The evolutionist rejects the doctrine of final causes : 

 he refuses to allow, as legitimate, belief in a directing 

 intelligence; yet he requires to have given him an 

 original arrangement of the universe exactly adapted 

 to his hypothesis. When we admire the order, and 

 rejoice in the beauty of the world that is, when we 

 turn to nature and ask, " How have all these exquisite 

 adaptations of one part of the organisation to another 

 part, and to the continuance of life, and of one organic 

 being to another being been perfected ? " * When the 

 mind turns back upon itself and marvels at the mys- 

 tery of that inner world; when we reflect that we 

 live, and that we live in a cosmos with marvellous 

 mutual adaptations between it and our thought, we 

 may well suspect the soundness of a theory which, 

 while rejecting the doctrine of a presiding intelligence, 

 directing all things towards its purpose, needs to 

 assume a special collocation of forces in the original 

 indeterminate mass a collocation so special and so 

 definite that the very least departure from it would 

 have been fatal to all this order, and would have 

 brought into existence a universe possibly without ad- 

 justments, fitting movement to movement, and part to 

 part, without the orderly and the beautiful to admire, 

 and without a self-conscious being to delight in it. 



* Darwin's Origin of Species, Chap. III. 



