196 DESIGN IN NATURE 



is conceded, but the advanced mechanical school attributes it to the atoms and not to the Deity Who made, energises, 

 and controls the atoms. The school in question transfers to matter the intelUgence, or its equivalent, hitherto 

 attributed to the Deity. According to it there is no duality in nature ; no Creator and created ; no tangible sub- 

 stance and spirit ; no free-will ; no life after death ; no immortality. As there is no getting away from adapta- 

 tion, which is another word for design, those who deny the existence of a Maker and Ruler of the universe are forced 

 to ascribe a self-forming, and self-moving, and adaptive power to everything the universe contains. They, how- 

 ever (and let this be noted), fail to account for the matter, force, hfe, and design which they encounter all along 

 the line of their investigations. They assume all these things, and say that matter and force are eternal and 

 indestructible, that hfe is the outcome of matter, and that design is mere adaptation. What cannot be proved 

 they boldly take for granted. They ridicule faith in the unseen in one direction, and extol it in another direction 

 when it suits their purpose. 



§ 33. Haeckel's Belief in the Omnipotence of Matter. 



Of all those who have written on the potency of matter in its relation to Hfe, force, and cognate subjects, 

 Professor Ernst Haeckel is entitled to take a foremost place. He may be considered the head of the material or 

 matter " cult." I do not agree with his views, but he is entitled to an unbiassed hearing, and I propose to give 

 a somewhat extended account of his conclusions — as far as possible in his own words — in order that the reader 

 may be supplied with the facts necessary to form an independent judgment. Haeckel's peculiar tenets are well 

 known on the continent of Europe, but have not been much studied at home ; a circumstance which makes it 

 imperative to consider them somewhat fully in this portion of the work. 



Professor Haeckel advocates spontaneous generation, evolution, natural selection, heredity, descent, &c., in 

 their widest sense. He completely ignores a First Cause and design, and assigns the universe and all it contains 

 to accident and blind chance. He preaches matter pure and simple, and excludes everything which does not 

 centre in matter, and which cannot be explained by it. He regards the highest animals, including the monkeys 

 and man, as the terminal links of one long, unbroken, continuous chain, which extends itself through time and space, 

 beginning with the simplest conceivable hving forms (plant and animal), and culminating in the most complex, as 

 represented by man. With him substance is everything, and there is only one living substance which has the power 

 of modifying and adapting itself indefinitely at the bidding of environment, extraneous stimulation, natural selec- 

 tion, accident and other inadequate causes ; the simplest plants and animals being, in every instance, the parents 

 or progenitors of the more complex, up to man himself. 



In his opinion the most perfect and higher forms are manufactured by endless trifling modifications in the 

 fulness of time out of the rudimentary and lower forms, in one continuous, unbroken series, as apart from a First 

 Cause, design, and types. 



The idea of separate creations of types in plants and animals is set aside. With him every living thing runs 

 into every other living thing, from the monad to the mollusc, and from the mollusc to the man. All hnes of 

 demarcation, all boundaries as between hving things, are swept away, and one vast, interminable, inextricable tangle 

 substituted. The principle of a designed, ascending series of plant and animal organisms, with variations within 

 limits, is tabooed. There is no halting-place, no room or opportunity for definitions, classification, or orderly 

 arrangement. No barriers of infertility are recognised. 



If, as Professor Haeckel and Mr. Darwin say, species are the result of modification, and are mutable up to 

 a point, then species, according to their own showing, are illusory, inasmuch as fixity cannot logically result from 

 continuous modification, however gradual and however prolonged. A species which is produced by a series of 

 changes cannot consistently become stable or permanent at any period of its history. The reader has to 

 decide as between a chaos of accidental modifications and adaptations in plants and animals extending over 

 illimitable periods, and a designed whole in which plants and animals have, from the first, or at different periods, 

 their limits or boundaries determined. In both cases there is continuity, but in the one the continuity is due to 

 the endless and accidental modification of one substance as apart from a First Cause, design, and life, while in 

 the other the continuity is due to the intelhgent modification of various substances with life and a First Cause as 

 dominant factors. 



In the former instance, development and heredity apply to the whole organic kingdom, there being no 

 boundaries or natural divisions as between the several plants and animals ; in the latter i-nstance, they apply to 

 groups and types of plants and animals where divisions can be recognised and an orderly arrangement more or 

 less satisfactorily estabhshed. In the one case, the ascending series consists, so to speak, of one long continuous 

 flight of steps ; in the other of several flights of steps with halting places between ; that is, points of departure 



