58 PROFESSOR DUNS ON THE 



REMARKS ON THE FOREGOING PAPER. 



BY SIR EDMUND S. BECKETT, Babt., Q.C.,LL.D. 



I shall not be in London till Wednesday, and therefore cannot 

 attend the meeting on Monday. Nor am I sufficiently versed in the 

 special subject of Dr. Duns' paper to make any useful remarks thereon. 

 But, on this general subject of Natural Selection v. Design, the more I read 

 about it the more I see the incompetency of the automatic cosmogonists to 

 account for the existence of anything in the world, and much more of the 

 whole world. It is the most miserably illogical pretence of a scientific 

 theory to say, as they in fact do, " We assume all the laws of nature to 

 have been self-existent or self-produced, and then we will show you how 

 some improvements and advances in some organised things might be pro- 

 duced ; and then we shall ask you to conclude that all living things have 

 advanced from lower ones in the same way. How the lowest began we 

 cannot say." The proper answer to that is that it is bad reasoning at every 

 stage. It is illogical to conclude that all changes can take place sponta- 

 neously because some can. So long as there are any phenomena, 

 especially considerable ones, which you cannot so explain, it is illogical 

 and unscientific to pretend that your theory is universal. We do not 

 believe in gravity being universal because it is proved by some 

 phenomena, but by all to which it can have any application. Show us 

 what natural selection has done towards producing an oak-tree out of a 

 toadstool, or ih'^ most rudimentary vegetable you like, and how that started ; 

 or answer any of the questions which have been put to you over and over 

 again as to its power of producing all sorts of organisms, and you will be 

 doing something. That is one end of the argument. The other is : Show 

 us how you start anything out of either nothing or a state of absolute 

 uniformity of matter and force, such as Mr. Spencer avowedly starts with, 

 and all the anti-creation school, whether they avow it or not. They 

 never have, and never can. Does any man in his senses believe that, if any 

 Spencerian thought he could give a logical answer to the article on Spencerian 

 Philosophy in the Edinburgh Revieio of January 1884, not one of them woulcx 

 have tried it; or to my paper in our Transactions about the same time. So 

 far as I have seen, there has been no serious attempt to answer either of them 

 There have been a few of a merely personal or utterly frivolous kind, such 

 as that in Knowledge, which filled two or three articles with elaborately 

 discussing the degree of, first the wickedness, and then the carelessness, of 

 miscopying which omitted exactly a line in Mr. Spencer's book, ending with 

 the same four words as the next line ; and then the interesting etymological 



