RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION, 519 



better adapted to the life they have to live. The very phrase which we com- 

 monly use to sum up Darwin's teaching, the survival of the fittest, implies a per- 

 petual diminution of pain and increase of enjoyment for all creatures that can 

 feel. If they are fitter for their surroundings, most certainly they will find life 

 easier to live. And, as if to mark still more plainly the beneficence of the whole 

 work, the less developed creatures, as we have every reason to believe, are less 

 sensible of pain and pleasure ; so that enjoyment appears to grow with the capa- 

 city for enjoyment, and suffering diminishes as sensitivity to suffering increases. 

 And there can be no doubt that this is in many ways the tendency of nature. 

 Beasts of prey are diminishing ; Hfe is easier for man and easier for all animals 

 that are under his care: many species of animals perish as man fills and subju- 

 gates the globe, but those that remain have far greater happiness in their lives. 

 In fact, all the purposes which Paley traces in the formation of living creatures 

 are not only fulfilled by what the Creator has done, but are better fulfilled from 

 age to age. And, though the progress may be exceedingly slow, the nature of 

 the progress cannot be mistaken. 



If the '' Natural Theology" were now to be written, the stress of the argu- 

 ment would be puLon a different place. Instead of insisting wholly or mainly 

 on the wonderful adaptation of means to ends in the structure of living animals 

 and plants, we should look rather to the original properties impressed on matter 

 from the beginning, and on the beneficent consequences that have flowed from 

 those properties. We should dwell on the peculiar properties that must be inher- 

 ent in the molecules of the original elements to cause such results to follow from 

 their action and re-action on one another. We should dwell on the part played 

 in the universe by the properties of oxygen, the great purifier, and one of the 

 great heat-givers ; of carbon, the chief light-giver and heat-giver; of water, the 

 great solvent and the store-house of heat; of the atmosphere and the vapors in 

 it, the protector of the earth which it surrounds. We should trace the beneficent 

 effects of pain and pleasure in their subservience to the purification of life. The 

 marks of a purpose impressed from the first on all creation would be even more 

 visible than ever before. 



And we could not overlook the beauty of nature and of all created things 

 as part of that purpose, coming in many cases out of that very survival of the 

 fittest of which Darwin has spoken, and yet a distinct object in itself. For this 

 beauty there is no need in the economy of Nature whatever. The beauty of 

 the starry heavens, which so impressed the mind of Kant that he put it by the 

 side of the moral law as proving the existence of a Creator, is not wanted either 

 for the evolution of the world or for the preservation of living creatures. Our 

 enjoyment of it is a super-added gift certainly not necessary for the existence or 

 the continuance of our species. The beauty of flowers, according to the teach- 

 ing of the doctrine of evolution, has generally grown out of the need which makes 

 it good for plants to attract insects. The insects carry the pollen from flower to 

 to flower, and thus, as it were mix the breed ; and this produces the stronger plants 

 which outlive the competition of the rest. The plants, therefore, which are most 



