Ii6 THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 



ing sufficiency to account for organic adaptations. 

 But riper thought has done more. It has come to be 

 reahzed that, in any case, natural selection does not 

 account for adaptation. Its function is wholly elimi- 

 native. It destroys the less fit, but does not cause the 

 fitness of what it permits to survive. The causes of 

 adaptation are to be looked for in the positive factors 

 of variation and inheritance; and, as I endeavoured to 

 show you in my last lecture, these appear to be under 

 direction. Variations are not purely fortuitous, nor 

 are they indefinite in range. There is a teleological 

 trend in the mutations of nature, and the argument 

 for design which the Darwinian hypothesis appeared 

 to strip naked and to kick out of doors has been re- 

 admitted and reclothed, and is now established at the 

 fireside more comfortably than ever. It would carry 

 me too far afield to present the argument for design 

 in its improved form. It is exhibited in many recent 

 treatises, and I have myself devoted a chapter to it in 

 my latest volume, on The Being and Attributes of God} 

 (b) The story has often been repeated of a certain 

 interview between M. Laplace and Napoleon Bona- 

 parte.^ The former was presenting a copy of one of 



1 Ch. vi. Cf. V. F. Storr, Development and Divine Purpose; 

 Fredk. Temple, Bampton Lectures, Lee. iii; A. Moore, Science and 

 the Faith, pp. 186-200; F. B. Jevons, Evolution, chh. xii, xiii; 

 Profeit, Creation of Matter; Illingworth, Personality, pp. 94-99; 

 Semi-Darwinian, Doubts about Darwinism. 



2 For instance, by Jas. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. 

 I. p. 4, who refers to W. W. Rouse Ball, Short Hist, of Mathematics, 

 p. 388. 



