EVOLUTIONARY TELEOLOGY. 357 



In a review of Darwin's volume on the " Fertiliza- 

 tion of Orchids" 1 (too technical and too detailed for 

 reproduction here), and later in a brief sketch of the 

 character of his scientific work (art. x., p. 284), we 

 expressed our sense of the great gain to science from 

 his having brought back teleology to natural history. 

 In Darwinism, usefulness and purpose come to the 

 front again as working principles of the first order ; 

 upon them, indeed, the whole system rests. 



To most, this restoration of teleology has come 

 from an unexpected quarter, and in an unwonted guise ; 

 so that the first look of it is by no means reassuring to 

 the minds of those who cherish theistic views of 'Na- 

 ture. Adaptations irresistibly suggesting purpose had 

 their supreme application in natural theology. Being 

 manifold, particular, and exquisite, and evidently in- 

 wrought into the whole system of the organic world, 

 they were held to furnish irrefragable as well as inde- 

 pendent proof of a personal designer, a divine origi- 

 nator of Nature. By a confusion of thought, now ob- 

 vious, but at the time not unnatural, they were also 

 regarded as proof of a direct execution of the contriv- 

 ver's purpose in the creation of each organ and organ- 

 ism, as it were, in the manner man contrives and puts 

 together a machine an idea which has been set up as 

 the orthodox doctrine, but which to St. Augustine and 

 other learned Christian fathers would have savored 

 of heterodoxy. 



In the doctrine of the origination of species through 

 natural selection, these adaptations appear as the out- 

 come rather than as the motive, as final results rather 



1 London, 1862. 

 16 



