154 DARWINIANA. 



thereby assumes that they are undirected. This is the 

 assumption of the Boston reviewers, and of Mr. Agas- 

 siz, who insists that the only alternative to the doc- 

 trine, that all organized beings were supernaturally 

 created just as they are, is, that they have arisen spon- 

 taneously through the omnipotence of matter. 1 



As to all this, nothing is easier than to bring out 

 in the conclusion what you introduce in the premises. 

 If you import atheism into your conception of vari- 

 ation and natural selection, you can readily exhibit it 

 in the result. If you do not put it in, perhaps there 

 need be none to come out. While the mechanician is 

 considering a steamboat or locomotive-engine as a ma- 

 terial organism, and contemplating the fuel, water, and 

 steam, the source of the mechanical forces, and how 

 they operate, he may not have occasion to mention 

 the engineer. But, the orderly and special results ac- 

 complished, the why the movements are in this or that 

 particular direction, etc., is inexplicable without him. 

 If Mr. Darwin believes that the events which he sup- 

 poses to have occurred and the results we behold were 

 undirected and undesigned, or if the physicist be- 

 lieves that the natural forces to which he refers phe- 

 nomena are uncaused and undirected, no argument is 

 needed to show that such belief is atheism. But the 

 admission of the phenomena and of these natural pro- 

 cesses and forces does not necessitate any such belief, 

 nor even render it one whit less improbable than 

 before. 



Surely, too, the accidental element may play its 

 part in Nature without negativing design in the the- 



1 In American Journal of Science, July, 1860, pp. 147-149. 



