Nov. 3, 1881 | 
NATURE 7 
attributes to me, and which he describes as a ‘‘ metaphysical” 
teleoloey—the idea of ‘‘an ultimate design pervading all nature, 
and blending into one harmonious Cosmos the combination and 
_ co-ordination of physical causes.” 
The first of these arguments from design he says he has a 
right to contest in your columns and to represent as ‘‘sub- 
verted”? by Mr. Darwin: whilst as regards the second of these 
arguments from design, he admits the truth of my position that 
“no possible amount of discovery concerning the physical causes 
of phenomena can affect it.” 
I am not able to accept this distinction, or to withdraw on 
the strength of it my protest against the original communication 
of Mr. Romanes. ‘The distinction is, in my opinion, purely 
imaginary and fallacious. The fundamental proposition of all 
arguments from design is simply this: that the exquisite adapta- 
tions to special ends which are conspicuous in organic natureare, 
and can only be, the work of physical forces when these are 
under the combination and direction and control of Mind. 
But the whole force of this general proposition, and the whole 
power of it to produce conviction, depends on its applicability to 
particular cases of adaptation. There may be, and there are in 
nature, a few cases of apparent adaptations and of orderly 
arrangements of a very simple kind which do not necessarily 
suggest Mental Purpose. They may be the effect of what we 
call accident, or of the action of elementary laws under no 
guidance or direction, Inorganic phenomena furnish many 
examples of such arrangements. Even among organic things 
there may be a few examples of them. But in the special and 
elaborate adaptations of organic structures to their particular 
work and function, the human mind recognises the operation of 
mental faculties having a fundamental analogy with its own. 
Mind is a known agency, producing well-known effects. Thee 
effects can be recognised with as much certainty as the effects of 
any material force acting by itself. The Argument from Design 
is founded on this recognition. The writers of the last genera- 
tion were perfectly right in resting the general Argument from 
Design on the separate instances of adaptation in which the mark 
of Mind is most signal and conspicuous, I hold, as they held, 
that each particular instance of adaptation which cannot be due 
to chance, and which cannot be due to the uncombined action of 
elementary forces, is “a separate piece of evidence pointing to 
operations of special de-ign.” 
Mr. Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection no more touches this 
argument than his hand could touch the fixed stars. 
When Sir Charles Bell wrote his beautiful and classical Treatise 
on the Hand, he knew that the hand of every individual man has 
been “developed” in the wom). He knew that in the course of 
that development it passed through many successive stages. He 
knew that the vital processes concerned in this development weie 
organic processes forming part of ‘‘natural law.” But it never 
occurred to him to imagine that the “law” under which such 
intricate and wonderful adaptations were reached was a “law” 
in which Design had no part, or over which Mental Purpose had 
no control. He saw in physical causation the instrument of 
Mental Purpose, and not its rival or its enemy. He knew, 
moreover, the close relations between the hand of man and the 
less perfect, but the equally adapted structures of the same limb 
in the lower animals. He knew, farther, that the theory of 
Evolution had been started, and that just as individuals were 
born and grew, so it was suggested that all Animal forms had 
been born of each other, and that the Human Hand was the 
result of a long gestation in the womb of Time. He alludes to 
these theories and sets them aside—not as being untrue, but as 
being immaterial to his argument. And he was right. 
Mr. Romanes is much mistaken if he supposes that the 
present generation is satisfied with the purely materialistic 
explanations of adapted structures which are erroneously sup- 
posed to be the final result of Mr. Darwin’s theory. So 
thoroughly dissatisfied, on the contrary, with these explanations 
is the mind of the present generation, that it is breaking out in 
revolt against them along allthe line. The old school of ‘Theism is 
as alive as ever, and is as ready as ever to appropriate every new 
fact into the structure of its well-worn defences. And outside 
this school—among men who’'reject Christianity altogether, and 
who sit loose from every known theology—a conviction. has 
arisen that somehow—by whatever name it may be called— 
Mind is indeed ‘‘immanent” in nature, working everywhere 
with an awful and an abiding Presence. 
This view has been supported of late in Germany in a power- 
ful argument by an author whose philosophy may seem grotesque, 
but who certainly has at his command all the resources of scien- 
tific knowledge, and who accepts and incorporates every fact 
which has been establiched in the whole field of biological 
investigation. 
I wish Mr. Darwin’s disciples would imitate a little of the 
dignified reticence of their master. He walks with a patient 
and a stately step along the paths of conscientious observation. 
No fact is too minute—no generalisationis too bold. But for the 
most part the whole is kept well within the limits, actual or sup- 
posed, of physical causation, and the rash dogmatism on higher 
questions of Philosophy and Theology which are common among 
his more fanatical disciples, are ‘‘ conspicuous by their absence” 
in his writings. ARGYLL 
Ir will be instructive to many, I doubt not, as to myself, to 
receive from Mr, Romanes an explanation of the precise sense 
which he attaches to the phrase ‘*a general law whose operation 
is presumably competent to produce” any set of phenomena. 
No one is more desirous than I am to see science freed from 
all theological complications ; and it seems to me that every one 
who speaks of laws as ‘‘ governing,” ‘‘ controlling,” ‘‘regu- 
lating,” or ‘‘ producing” phenomena, is really mixing up ideas 
belonging to two entirely distinct categories. 
That in the purely scientific sense, a ‘‘law of Nature” is 
nothing mcre than a general expression of a certain set of uni- 
formities which the intellect of man discerns in the surrounding 
universe—that such a law holds good just so far as it has been 
verified, and not necessarily any further—that it accounts for 
nothing, and explains nothing—and that the power of predic- 
tion which it is supposed to give, depends entirely on an 
assumption of its universality, which may or may not be justified 
by facts—was the teaching of the great masters (Herschel, 
Whewell, and Baden-Powell), who aimed to form correct habits 
of thought among what half a century ago was the “rising 
generation” of scientific men. And as all subsequent writers 
on the logic of science, from J. S. Mill to W. Stanley Jevons, 
have taken the same view, I venture to think that it rests with 
Mr. Romanes to show that there is anything in the /aw of 
Natural Selection (which is simply the generalised expression of 
the fact of ‘‘the survival of the fittest’’), that places it ina 
different category from every other. 
The whole series of expressions to which I have taken excep- 
tion may Le regarded either as a ‘‘survival” of the theological 
conceptions by which science was formerly dominated, or as the 
result of a very common confusion between a ‘‘law ” of science 
and a “law” of a state. For a ‘‘law” can only ‘‘ govern,” 
“‘control,” ‘‘ regulate,” ‘* produce,” or exert any kind of coercive 
agency, when there is a power to give it effect ; the ‘‘law,” in 
that :ense, being simply the expression of the will of such 
governing power, divine or human, as the case may be. 
But as science (and in this I am quite at one with Mr, 
Romanes) knows nothing of such ‘‘ metaphysical” conceptions, 
I cannot but think that it would be much better that scientific 
language should be cleared from expressions that have no mean- 
ing at all, ifit be not one based upon them, 
Tf I have not made my meaning sufficiently clear, I may refer 
any one who wishes to see this matter more fully discussed to 
my paper on ‘Nature and Law,” in the Modern Review for 
October, 1880, WILLIAM B, CARPENTER 
36, Regent’s Park Road, N.W., October 29 
P.S.—I regret that my reference to what Mr. Simon (in_his 
address on Public Med cine at the International Medical Con- 
gress) designated as ‘‘the very remarkable series of facts ? 
adduced by Dr. Creigh:on in support of his view of the com- 
municability of bovine tuberculosis to man through the medium 
of milk, should have been so worded as to make it appear that 
Dr. Creighton accepts the doctrine of Klebs as to the ‘micro- 
coccus” origin of tubercle, his dissent from which he had 
explicitly recorded. As Mr, Simon spoke of Klebs’ doctrine as 
having been ‘solidly settled and widely extended” by the recent 
researches of Schiiller, and as Dr. Creighton’s difficulty of con- 
ceiving ‘a neutral (?) living organism” to be “charged with 
the power of conveying complex details of form and structure 
from one body to another,” affords no disproof of it, there 
seemed to me no occasion, in writing for the gencral public, to 
take any special notice of a point which Mr. Simon, in 
addressing a professional audience, had thought it better to pass 
without mention.—W. B. C. 
