WHAT TO BELIEVE IN SCIENCE : TELEOLOGY OE EVOLUTION. 1 7 
summate skill of the contriver.” But not a single specimen of 
human art does,' in fact, possess this faculty, while it is common 
not only to many, but to all, the species of living organisms. 
With this essential difference, then, between the designs of art 
and of Nature before his eyes and noted by his pen, he was 
almost bound to suspect that there would be some correspond- 
ing difference in the manner of production. Anthropomorphism 
is the attributing to non-human powers or agents the actions 
and feelings of mankind. What with the imperfection of lan- 
guage and the feebleness of reason, we cannot wholly escape 
from the fallacies into which anthropomorphism is apt to lead 
us. Analogies of the painter and the tailor and the mecha- 
nician have overmastered Paley and many others when contem- 
plating the colours and the drapery given by Nature, and all 
those levers and valves and syringes and tubes and engines and 
circulating fluids, within the body, which the same Nature has 
concealed under robes almost endlessly varying in texture, hue, 
and pattern. New fashions are invented by human tailors and 
dressmakers to satisfy human caprice ; and artificial clothing 
will not adapt itself to changes of season or the exigencies of 
travel. To meet variety of circumstance man must resort to 
variety of design, to many a “ distinct creation,” so to speak, 
in the sphere of art. But Nature is not to be thought of as 
a mortal artist, as a human mechanic. Nature is not to be 
charged with caprices. Nature is not bound by all the limita- 
tions which affect the contrivances of man. Obviously, and by 
the confession of all, in organic life there is a power of repro- 
duction; the recurring process of generation. That a living 
organism is adapted to produce an organism like itself, we all 
admit ; but what to many seems so impossible, so heretical, so 
derogatory to Gfod and man, is simply this, that an organism 
should be adapted by Nature to produce an organism not like 
itself. This is the crime of the Evolutionist. The head and 
front of his offending, that he attributes to the Author of Nature 
a power of contrivance so far beyond man’s, a foresight, an 
adaptation of means to ends, not only immeasurably beyond 
what appears in the achievements of art, but beyond all that 
art has ever attempted or even imagined. Men heap scorn 
upon the process of development, as though it were a light thing 
for Omnipotence, in a moment, abruptly, by an act of distinct 
creation, to call into existence, out of the dust of the earth, a 
man with his eyes and arms and brains and gastric juices and 
all the other curious chemistry and mechanism of his body ; but 
they seem to think that the same Omnipotence would have been 
baffled in the attempt, however long pursued, to derive a man 
from another creature already organised, such for example as 
an Ascidian. They might just as well say that generation is 
VOL. XIII. — NO. L. C 
