I 4 o EVOLUTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



to their nature, from the atom to Sirius and 

 Alcyone, or from the moner to the man or the 

 archangel. 



Wallace, in his essay on the Limits of Natural 

 Selection as applied to Man,* argues that we 

 may trace in Nature, and especially in the origin 

 of man, the action of intelligences controlling 

 the action of natural law for definite ends. 



Startling as it may seem to many that a scien- 

 tific man should put forward such an idea, it is 

 certainly neither philosophically improbable nor 

 unlikely, unless we venture to deny the existence 

 of any intelligence in the Universe higher than 

 our own. There is really nothing more opposed 

 to natural law in higher intelligences guiding 

 the operation of the ordinary laws of Nature to 

 evolve man, than in man himself improving his 

 domesticated animals in the same manner ; and 

 such a theory rests on a very different basis from 

 those which call in the aid of unlimited and 

 gratuitous miracle to reconcile the doctrine of 

 Special Creation with existing facts ; as when 

 Mongo Pontonf undertakes to describe the order 



* " Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection," pp-332-372 A. 

 t " The Beginning," ch. 2 



