18 Luck, or Cunning ? 
modification. What, then, were the wrong entries in these 
two sets of accounts, on the detection and removal of 
which they would be found to balance as they ought ? 
Paley’s weakest place, as already implied, is in the matter 
of rudimentary organs ; the almost universal presence in 
the higher organisms of useless, and sometimes even 
troublesome, organs is fatal to the kind of design he is 
trying to uphold; granted that there is design, still it 
cannot be so final and far-foreseeing as he wishes to make 
it out. Mr. Darwin’s weak place, on the other hand, lies, 
firstly, in the supposition that because rudimentary organs 
imply no purpose now, they could never in time past have 
done so—that because they had clearly not been designed 
with an eye to all circumstances and all time, they never, 
therefore, could have been designed with an eye to any time 
or any circumstances ; and, secondly, in maintaining that 
“accidental,” ‘fortuitous,’ *‘ spontaneous” variations 
could be accumulated at all except under conditions that 
have never been fulfilled yet, and never will be; in other 
words, his weak place lay in the contention (for it comes 
to this) that there can be sustained accumulation of bodily 
wealth, more than of wealth of any other kind, unless 
sustained experience, watchfulness, and good sense preside 
over the accumulation. In “ Life and Habit,” following 
Mr. Mivart, and, as I now find, Mr. Herbert Spencer, I 
showed (pp. 279-281) how impossible it was for variations 
to accumulate unless they were for the most part underlain 
by a sustained general principle ; but this subject will be 
touched upon more fully later on. 
The accumulation of accidental variations which owed 
nothing to mind either in their inception, or their accumula- 
tion, the pitchforking, in fact, of mind out of the universe, 
or at any rate its exclusion from all share worth talking 
about in the process of organic development, this was the 
pill Mr. Darwin had given us to swallow; but so thickly 
had he gilded it with descent with modification, that we 
