224 Miscellaneous. 
It would be superfluous to discuss in detail the arguments by which 
Mr. Darwin attempts to explain the diversity among animals. Suffice 
it to say that he has lost sight of the most striking of the features, 
and the one which pervades the whole, namely, that there runs 
throughout Nature unmistakeable evidence of thought, corresponding 
to the mental operations of our own mind, and therefore intelligible 
to us as thinking beings, and unaccountable on any other basis than 
that they owe their existence to the working of intelligence ; and no 
theory that overlooks this element can be true to Nature. 
There are naturalists who seem to look upon the idea of creation 
(that is, a manifestation of an intellectual power by material means) 
as a kind of bigotry, forgetting, no doubt, that whenever they carry 
out a thought of their own, they do something akin to creating, 
unless they look upon their own elucubrations as something in which 
their individuality is not concerned, but arising without an interven- 
tion of their mind, in consequence of the working of some “ bundles 
of forces”? about which they know nothing themselves. And yet 
such men are ready to admit that matter is omnipotent, and consider 
a disbelief in the omnipotence of matter as tantamount to imbecility ; 
for what is the assumed power of matter to produce all finite beings, 
but omnipotence? And what is the outcry raised against those who 
cannot admit it, but an insinuation that they are non compos? The 
book of Mr. Darwin is free of all such uncharitable sentiments 
towards his fellow-labourers in the field of science ; nevertheless his 
mistake lies in a similar assumption, that the most complicated system 
of combined thoughts can be the result of accidental causes; for he 
ought to know, as every physicist will concede, that all the influences 
to which he would ascribe the origin of species are accidental in their 
very nature, and he must know, as every naturalist familiar with the 
_modern progress of science does know, that the organized beings 
which live now, and have lived in former geological periods, constitute 
an organic whole, intelligibly and methodically combined in all its 
parts. As a zoologist, he must know in particular, that the animal 
kingdom is built upon four different plans of structure, that the 
reproduction and growth of animals take place according to four 
different modes of development, and that unless it is shown that these 
four plans of structure and these four modes of development are 
transmutable one into the other, no transmutation theory can account 
for the origin of species. The fallacy of Mr. Darwin’s theory of the 
origin of species by means of natural selection may be traced in the 
first few pages of his book, where he overlooks the difference between 
the voluntary and deliberate acts of selection applied methodically 
by man to the breeding of domesticated animals and the growing of 
cultivated plants, and the chance influences which may affect animals 
and plants in the state of nature. To call these influences ‘‘ natural 
selection’? is a misnomer which will not alter the conditions under 
which they may produce the desired results. Selection implies 
design ; the powers to which Darwin refers the origin of species can 
design nothing. Selection is no doubt the essential principle on 
which the raising of breeds is founded, and the subject of breeds is 
