144 
NATURAL SELECTION 
VII 
which those laws are not in themselves capable of producing ; 
that the universe alone, with all its laws intact, would be 
a sort of chaos, without variety, without harmony, without 
design, without beauty; that there is not (and therefore we 
may presume that there could not be) any self -developing 
power in the universe, I believe, on the contrary, that the 
universe is so constituted as to be self-regulating; that as 
long as it contains Life, the forms under which that life is 
manifested have an inherent power of adjustment to each 
other and to surrounding nature ; and that this adjustment 
necessarily leads to the greatest amount of variety and beauty 
and enjoyment, because it does depend on general laws, and 
not on a continual supervision and rearrangement of details. 
As a matter of feeling and religion, I hold this to be a far 
higher conception of the Creator and of the Universe than 
that which may be called the “continual interference” 
hypothesis; but it is not a question to be decided by our 
feelings or convictions — it is a question of facts and of reason. 
Could the change which geology shows us has continually 
taken place in the forms of life, have been produced by general 
laws, or does it imperatively require the incessant supervision 
of a creative mind ? This is the question for us to consider, 
and our opponents have the difficult task of proving a nega- 
tive, if we show that there are both facts and analogies in 
our favour . 1 
Mr. Dantrin’s Metaphors liable to Misconception 
Mr. Darwin has laid himself open to much misconception, 
and has given to his opponents a powerful weapon against 
himself, by his continual use of metaphor in describing the 
wonderful co-adaptations of organic beings. 
“ It is curious,” says the Duke of Argyll, “ to observe the 
language which this most advanced disciple of pure naturalism 
instinctively uses, when he has to describe the complicated 
structure of this curious order of plants (the Orchids). 
c Caution in ascribing intentions to nature ’ does not seem to 
1 In addition to tlie laws referred to above, there are of course the funda- 
mental laws and properties of organised matter and the mysterious powers of 
Life, which we shall probably never be able to explain, but which must be 
taken as the basis of all attempts to account for the details of form and 
structure in organised beings. 
