18 



and I know my destiny, and if I have learnt my duty and mis- 

 sion in this world, no one is to blame but myself if I do not do 

 it. It neither prevents nor helps me to do this, to hear either 

 that I was or was not descended from an ape, an ascidian, or an 

 amoeba ! If the probability be proved to outweigh the impro- 

 bability, I am ready to accept it ; and I care not so long as truth 

 prevail.^ 



Having alluded to embryology, I would here venture to in- 

 sert a few strictures upon Mr. Lewes^s remarks touching this 

 subject. He calls the processes through which the embryo 

 passes bungling.^^ Now, granting that, for the sake of argu- 

 ment, he assumes a Deity to have done this, surely he is philo- 

 sophizing subjectively; for how can he, any more than a tele- 

 ologist, pronounce what is, and what is not, " bungling ^' to an 

 Infinite Mind ? He is deciding, out of his own conceptions, what 

 is and what is not derogatory to a Deity. The Teleologist does 

 not presume to do so : yet he is a Positivist, and denounces 

 subjective philosophy ! He appears to overlook in this case 

 that what invariably takes place is subject to inductive law ; 

 and that the fact that all animals pass through representa- 

 tive conditions of inferior types in succession, while in the 

 embryonic condition, is therefore a law of nature. If it be so, 

 he, as a Positivist, ought to accept it as such. I regard it as a 

 powerful witness to evolution, and that such was the method 

 by which God chose to work, and see nothing derogatory about 

 it at all ! 



I strongly protest against the expressions tentative and 

 blundering,^' " Nature feeling her way,'' &c. When we con- 

 sider that the result always comes out all right; human 

 foetuses go on blundering every day all over the world, yet there 

 is no error in the result. Nay, more, the foetuses of all ani- 

 mals do the same — the results are equally good, whatever the 

 species. If we can infer anything from this, it is that this 

 " blundering " method is always a very successful one ; and we, 

 as human beings, have no cause to complain of having been 



* In this essay I do not profess to deal with metaphysical subjects. I 

 have therefore made no mention of the soul of man. I will only repeat words 

 which I have elsewhere said {Geology and Genesis : a Plea for the Doctrine 

 of Evolution. A Sermon. HardAvicke). " Admit that man's bodily struc- 

 ture agrees closely with that of apes ; admit that his mental powers are of a 

 like kind to those of the lower animals ; deduct as much as there is of agree- 

 ment between them from man, and what is left ? An enormous amount of 

 intellectual power ; a morality which they do not possess at all, as well as 

 the power to appreciate and love an abstraction or an idea ; and I say there 

 i$ no species, no genus, no family in nature that has ever existed or does 

 ebita^t', which affords us any ground for conceiving such an enormous impulse, 

 as'iuau has obtained somewhere, to have come to him by natural laws alone." 



