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 
a 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. Hardwicke). “ 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 
is no species, no genus, no family in nature that has ever existed or does 
exist, which affords us any ground for conceiving such an enormous impulse, 
as man has obtained somewhere, to have come to him by natural laws alone.” 
