Design and Natural Selection 491 
Mr Hobhouse has given us the valuable phrase “a niche of 
organic opportunity.” Such a phrase would have borne a different 
sense in non-evolutionary thought. In that thought, the opportunity 
was an opportunity for the Creative Power, and Design appeared in 
the preparation of the organism to fit the niche. The idea of the 
niche and its occupant growing together from simpler to more com- 
plex mutual adjustment was unwelcome to this teleology. If the 
adaptation was traced to the influence, through competition, of the 
environment, the old teleology lost an illustration and a proof. For 
the cogency of the proof in every instance depended upon the absence 
of explanation. Where the process of adaptation was discerned, the 
evidence of Purpose or Design was weak. It was strong only when 
the natural antecedents were not discovered, strongest when they 
could be declared undiscoverable. 
Paley’s favourite word is “Contrivance” ; and for him contrivance 
is most certain where production is most obscure. He points out the 
physiological advantage of the valvulae conniventes to man, and the 
advantage for teleology of the fact that they cannot have been formed 
by “action and pressure.” What is not due to pressure may be 
attributed to design, and when a “mechanical” process more subtle 
than pressure was suggested, the case for design was so far weakened. 
The cumulative proof from the multitude of instances began to dis- 
appear when, in selection, a natural sequence was suggested in which 
all the adaptations might be reached by the motive power of life, and 
especially when, as in Darwin’s teaching, there was full recognition of 
the reactions of life to the stimulus of circumstance. “The organism 
fits the niche,” said the teleologist, “because the Creator formed it 
so as to fit.” “The organism fits the niche,” said the naturalist, 
“because unless it fitted it could not exist.” “It was fitted to sur- 
vive,’ said the theologian. “It survives because it fits,” said the 
selectionist. The two forms of statement are not incompatible; but 
the new statement, by provision of an ideally universal explanation 
of process, was hostile to a doctrine of purpose which relied upon 
evidences always exceptional however numerous. Science persistently 
presses on to find the universal machinery of adaptation in this planet ; 
and whether this be found in selection, or in direct-effect, or in vital 
reactions resulting in large changes, or in a combination of these and 
other factors, it must always be opposed to the conception of a Divine 
Power here and there but not everywhere active. 
For science, the Divine must be constant, operative everywhere 
and in every quality and power, in environment and in organism, 
in stimulus and in reaction, in variation and in struggle, in heredi- 
tary equilibrium, and in “the unstable state of species”; equally 
present on both sides of every strain, in all pressures and in all 
