WHAT TO BELIEVE IN SCIENCE : TELEOLOGY OR EVOLUTION. 23 
species of fish not to increase in numbers but to survive, it is 
magnificent, but assuredly it is not the result of special design. 
Sir Charles Bell speaks of u the force of our conviction that 
all that regards man’s state is ordered in perfection.” Bishop 
Wilson, on the contrary, calls “ the remembrance of our own 
Infirmities and Miserys an excellent Antidote against ye Poison 
of Vanity.” We stand highest in the scale of visible Nature; 
and because we see nothing higher than ourselves, we vainly 
and ingloriously think that “ the force of Nature can no further 
go.” We claim to be autochthons, sprung from the ground 
itself, investing the old pagan boast with the dignity of a 
divine utterance. We cannot embrace the idea either of a past 
when man was something less than man, or of a future when 
man shall have become something more than man. We tell 
our children pretty fables about the man who wished for eyes 
with the powers of the finest microscope, and the man who 
wished to be able to read the thoughts in the breasts of his 
brethren, and the man who asked to know the number of his 
days, that he might be certified how long he had to live, and 
the man who soared to the sky on cloud-piercing wings ; and 
the moral is that all these wishes and strivings for faculties 
enlarged and ennobled, for something better than our present 
selves, something more perfect than our present perfection, 
ended in disaster and shame. Silly little moral ! craven,, 
ignoble, and pernicious, unintelligent of man’s origin, with no 
penetration into the destiny which that origin foreshadows ! If 
teleology, the science of design, teaches anything, it teaches 
this, that the world as it exists for humanity could never have 
been so good nor so bad, that the race of man could never have 
been either so blessed or so cursed as it is, if the whole complex 
design had been from the first stationary, unprogressive, inca- 
pable of improvement, finished out of hand by an act of dis- 
tinct creation. 
The Irishman said that one man was as good as another, and 
a great deal better. Numbers of persons, who are not Irish, 
maintain that the creatures inhabiting our globe are just the 
same as they were at the Creation, and a great deal worse. 
This, in fact, is the old, time-honoured, orthodox, popular 
opinion. There is an opposite opinion held by a small set of 
fanatics, known as men of science, that forms of life have been 
continually changing, that they are still changing, and are 
likely to continue to change. They believe that the changes 
have been on the whole for the better, and that the laws of 
Nature made it almost impossible that they should have been 
or should be on the whole for the worse. They think this* con- 
ception of Nature quite as worthy of an Artist supremely wise 
