THEORIES Of NATURAli SELECTION AND DESIGN. o*! 



of animal structure and form first enunciated by him. The 

 testimony of consciousness to the dependence of intelh'gent 

 action on will, and to will as an attribute of personality, is as 

 trustworthy as the testimony of sight to the fitness between 

 the bill and the talons of the birds of prey and their habits. 

 Nor is the significance of the testimony weakened by 

 linking with it the intuition of God, because this intuition 

 is as much a fact of man's nature as any bodily appetite is. 

 Moreover, according to Cuvier's great law, each organ, or part 

 of an organ, gives the whole organism ; so that from the frag- 

 ment of a bone the entire animal, in its essential features, may 

 be represented. This discovery created a new science, — 

 palaeontology. There had been descriptions of fossil remains 

 previously ; but he re-constructed, from mere fragments of 

 structure, long extinct forms, and showed what had been their 

 very manner of life. And what was his guide ? The recog- 

 nition of design, — of contrivance, — in the reciprocal rela- 

 tions and mutual dependence of the parts of an organism 

 and the whole, and also between the organs of an animal 

 and its habits of life. In no imaginable circumstances could 

 the use of the theory of natural selection have rendered this 

 service to science. 



The leading features of the new point of view are belief in 

 teleology, and denial of final cause, — the recognition of 

 adaptations in nature and the refusal to ascribe them to inten- 

 tion. They are the outcome of the action of an impersonal 

 factor, — natural selection, — a force the concentrated form of 

 innumerable purely physical influences. The work assigned 

 to it is thus described : — " Natural selection is daily and hourly 

 scrutinising, throughout the world, es^ery variation, even the 

 slightest ; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding 

 up all that is good ; silently and insensibly working, when- 

 ever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of 

 each organic being in relation to its organic and in- 

 organic conditions of life " (Darwin). It watches over 

 tendencies to variation in order to use deteriorating elements 

 for the destruction of species, and improving elements for 

 their perpetuation. Somehow an imaginary something is 

 everywhere actively realising results hitherto traced to the 

 presence and potency of creative inworking. 



The two views referred to above may now be brought into 

 closer contrast. According to that just noticed there is 

 nothing fixed either in the structure or the relations of 

 organisms. Tendency to change is inherent. It influences 

 the elements of organisms, the compound substance of 



