ygo Correspondence. [December, 
they cannot be fairly denied, are explained away ; beauty is pro- 
nounced substantially universal, and is supposed to have been 
called into being for the spec'al delectation of man ; and last, 
but not least, the purposes of God are assumed as fully known 
and understood, according to the old use and wont of tele- 
ologists.” 
Now, as a matter of demonstrable fact, not one of these 
clauses describes my position with any tolerable degree of accu- 
racy. Nowhere in my work is Nature “ declared perfect ” in 
the sense that Mr. Slater seems eager to attach to the assertion. 
I distinctly, and in so many words, disclaim the attempt to 
prove this the best of all possible worlds, which, if Nature were 
perfect in the full sense of the word, it would be. My book is 
rather an attempt to discover the tendencies of Natural Laws, 
to ascertain whether they point to justice or to injustice, mercy 
or cruelty, beauty or deformity. From a synthesis of such ten- 
dencies I seek to arrive at some conception of the Spirit of 
Nature. Nor do I “explain away pain and suffering ” any fur- 
ther than by pointing out that we probably exaggerate the sensi- 
bility of the lower animals, and that there are certain indications 
of an effort on Nature’s part toward alleviation of pain in cases 
where it can no longer acft as an announcement of injury or 
stimulus to escape. Nowhere do I assert that “ beauty is sub- 
stantially universal,” being fully aware of the difficulty of effect- 
ively upholding such an assertion as regards the animal kingdom, 
although I maintain, and I think establish, the prevalence of 
beauty in the plant-world ; nor do I hold the tenable thesis that 
it is for man alone that such beauty was prepared. Beauty for 
its own sake seems rather to be Nature’s aim. But the most 
wildly inapplicable of all is the last clause, in which we are 
accused of assuming the purposes of God as fully known and 
understood. As applied to my volume this statement has all the 
delicate fidelity which distinguishes the pencil-drawings of a 
child of four. And in saying this I do not forget that Mr. Slater 
has the Bishop of Carlisle’s work also in hand, for what he there 
says ought to be true of both. Now the remainder of the article 
is so completely based upon the conception assumed here that 
its pertinence stands or falls with it. 
As to the accusation of dogmatism (not to mention the humi- 
liating and highly original charge of youth) it comes with scant 
grace from one who, throughout the article, shows himself 
nothing if not a dogmatist of the New Natural History, lhat 
the indictment is untrue I am convinced, not only from my own 
consciousness, but from the gratuitous statements of other critics 
as impartial if not so “ superior ” as Mr. Slater. 
That he should confound my position with Paley’s is possibly 
excusable, considering that he is probably one of the thousands 
who speak glibly of Paley’s without any thorough acquaintance 
with his argument. None the less do I stoutly deny the identity 
