ON THE CREATION AND GOD. 35 



new train of arguments, which the materialist has long 

 been in want of. It does more than this. It suggests 

 new reflections and arguments to all classes of philoso- 

 phical thinkers ; so much so, that it will necessitate a 

 fresh reconsideration of all philosophical and theological 

 problems. Nay, what some may consider of possibly 

 more consequence, it will necessitate an examination, 

 from the very basis, of all our current theories of morals 

 possibly a fundamental reconstruction of them. The 

 appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species in this century, 

 as of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in the last century, 

 makes and marks the beginning of a new epoch in the 

 history of all philosophical, theological, and moral specu- 

 lation ; an epoch which, in the opinion of some evolution- 

 ists, is destined to simplify greatly all three of them, if 

 not to remove two of them theology and philosophy 

 wholly from the list of independent subjects of thought. 

 This it is which makes the importance of the Darwinian 

 hypothesis. 



7. Theology and philosophy, at least, will be sim- 

 plified on evolution principles. For if the perfections of 

 organs and their exquisite adaptations to their several 

 ends and to each other were achieved by slow natural 

 process, and only after many abortive and unskilful 

 attempts had been made the blunders and failures being 

 necessarily dropped and hidden away from our sight 

 it would seem futile as well as useless to argue, from 

 adaptations that have been slowly made and necessarily 

 left, to a designing mind that conceived and constructed 

 them all at once, as the old theologians argued. If all 

 adaptations can be accounted for as results that came 

 simply by natural process, why suppose preconceptions 

 and special construction of them ? More especially, if 

 good results must have been reached by natural selection 



