20 Luck, or Cunning ? 
though one which he does not appear to have caught sight 
of. I saw also that his denial of design was only, so to 
speak, skin deep, and that his system was in reality tele- 
ological, inasmuch as, to use Isidore Geoffroy’s words, it 
makes the organism design itself. In making variations 
depend on changed actions, and these, again, on changed 
views of life, efforts, and designs, in consequence of changed 
conditions of life, he in effect makes effort, intention, will, 
all of which involve design (or at any rate which taken 
together involve it), underlie progress in organic develop- 
ment. True, he did not know he was a teleologist, but he 
was none the less a teleologist for this. He was an uncon- 
scious teleologist, and as such perhaps more absolutely 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 providence, and whatever theories we may form 
about the origin and development of the universe, we may 
* “Hist. Nat. Gén.,” tom. ii. p. 411, 1859. 
