34:2 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



work out, though one of much complexity when con- 

 sidered in its details. Professor Oscar Schmidt, in his 

 work on Danvinism and Descent, in appearance differing 

 from Professor Huxley, but only in appearance, discerns 

 in the evolutionary process, as its most essential attri- 

 bute, the fact of contingency, or as we have simply 

 described it chance. Professor Huxley's physical and 

 mechanical necessity is quite compatible with this meta- 

 physical contingency; indeed, as he himself tells us, it 

 implies it, for he assures us that Darwinism is exclusive 

 of teleology of all design and purpose. And when he 

 speaks of a hypothetical intelligence that might have 

 predicted the final results on the earth life, conscious- 

 ness, and all the rest that followed from these he only 

 means to say that if such an intelligence had existed, 

 capable of seeing clearly the chance combinations that 

 might result and that would result, then he had only to 

 make his mechanical or physico-chemical calculation to 

 know what would follow. The properties of unchanging 

 matter would determine the rest, if only the contingent 

 combinations were known or given. But it is quite 

 clear that, even admitting the actions of all bodies and 

 even all animals to be as physically necessary as the 

 motions of the planets round the sun, there is still 

 endless room for the play of contingency, just as there 

 is in the course of a man's life, though, on the necessi- 

 tarian view, as maintained by Huxley, all his actions 

 are in like manner determined, and even in the end 

 physically determined. If all be physical necessity, there 

 is ample room for contingency, for chance, unless, indeed,, 

 there was not only a hypothetical but a real intelligence of 

 some kind, and not only an intelligence but a power that 

 in some way exercised a control over the course of evolu- 

 tion, and in some way aimed at the final good results. 



