THEOLOGICAL INFLUENCES. 189 
organisms, a divergence into novelty must needs be 
inferred on @ priori grounds, from the existence of 
the simple and uniform, and the necessity of adapta- 
tion to altered external conditions. But with develop- 
ment in various directions, under the guidance of 
natural selection, progress is necessarily combined. It 
is one of the greatest services rendered by the theory 
of selection, that it has finally broken with the notion of 
design, which hitherto invested the organic world with 
perfection externally bestowed, and even in the pro- 
vince of intelligence and morality, where it is said with 
Schiller, 
So grows the Man as grow his greater aims,* 
has secured admittance for the uniform method of 
natural science. 
It is highly remarkable how the teleological view 
of nature could be so long upheld, and is still in 
part upheld, by theological influence although in the 
whole organic world we behold a merely relative per- 
fection, and the manifest and multifarious arrangements 
adverse to design in every grade of organisms, bear a 
bad testimony to the external directing ‘Power. The 
perfection exhibited by comparative anatomy, and the 
estimate of physiological functions is, under all circum- 
stances, the result of adaptation and selection. In the 
struggle of all against all, those individuals win who 
in any degree excel their fellows in the division of 
labour, which, if the direction of activity be altered, 
often obliges them to disuse organs which were once of 
service, but in the new conditions are useless, and, it 
may be generally said, have become injurious. 
* Es wiichst der Mensch mit seinen gréssern Zwecken. 
