26 INTERPRETATIONS OF NATURE. 
In seeking to explain these laws—the growth of living 
things, the changes wrought by natural selection and re- 
version, the conflicts of life in the pressing struggle for 
existence, the survival of some and the destruction of 
many—the doctrine of evolution seeks only to interpret 
phenomena .and the laws of their succession ; to know 
methods, not purposes. It enters not into the secret 
councils of creative cause. Its teachings seem to me 
eminently teleological, although, in the action of sec- 
ondary causes, they regard mechanical necessity alone. 
By the operation of these natural causes, the explana- 
tion is found for the many apparent contradictions of 
design. 
It is, indeed, true that evolution alters our concep- 
tions of the relations of a creative and superintending 
intelligence in the world; but it does not deny its exist- 
ence. Indeed, as I have already stated, such an exist- 
ence is the first and most essential postulate of all philo- 
sophical reasoning. 
Professor Huxley well says: ‘‘ Perhaps the most re- 
markable service to the philosophy of biology rendered 
by Mr. Darwin is the reconciliation of teleology and 
morphology, and the explanation of the facts of both, 
which his views offer.’ ‘‘The teleological and me- 
chanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually 
exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a me- 
chanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume 
a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the 
phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and 
the more completely is he there by at the mercy of the 
teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that 
the primordial molecular arrangement was not intended 
to evolve the phenomena of the universe.” 
Adaptation, contrivance and design—even as we know 
them—relate to the operations of mind, and the logical 
continuity of thought requires us to ascribe them—when 
