lo LUCK, OR CUNNING ? 



involve design (or at any rate which taken together 

 involve it), underlie progress in organic development. 

 True, he did not know he was a teleologist, but he was 

 none the less a teleologist for this. He was an un- 

 conscious teleologist, and as such perhaps more abso- 

 lutely an upholder of teleology than Paley himself ; but 

 this is neither here nor there ; our concern is not with 

 what people think about themselves, but with what 

 their reasoning makes it evident that they really hold. 



How strange the irony that hides us from ourselves ! 

 When Isidore Geoffroy said that according to Lamarck 

 organisms designed themselves,* and endorsed this, aS 

 to a great extent he did, he still does not appear to 

 have seen that either he or Lamarck were in reality 

 reintroducing design into organism ; he does not appear 

 to have seen this more than Lamarck himself had seen 

 it, but, on the contrary, like Lamarck, remained under 

 the impression that he was opposing teleology or 

 purposiveness. 



Of course in one sense he did oppose it ; so do we 

 all, if the word design be taken to intend a very far 

 foreseeing of minute details, a riding out to meet 

 trouble long before it comes, a provision on academic 

 principles for contingencies that are little likely to 

 arise. We can see no evidence of any such design as 

 this in nature, and much everywhere that makes against 

 it. There is no such improvidence as over providencCj 

 and whatever theories we may form about the origin 

 and development of the universe, we may be sure that 

 it is not the work of one who is unable to understand 



* Hist. Nat. Gen., torn. ii. p. 411, 1859. 



