formity of result, the unchangeableness of the Divinity, but of creative acts that exemplify the infinity of His resources." "150

27. With the idea of design, stamped on animal structures and instincts, Mr. Darwin, by the necessity of his hypothesis, is at open war. He admits in the frankest way that a belief in Final Causes, or, as Cuvier preferred calling them, the Conditions of Existence, would be fatal to his scheme. A prospect-glass or a forceps is an instrument; they have each a final cause; that is, they were each made and adjusted for a certain use. The use of the prospect-glass is to assist the eye: the use of the forceps is to assist the hand. The prospect-glass was made the better to see; the forceps the better to grasp. The use did not make these instruments; they were each made for the use--which use was foreseen and premeditated in the mind of the maker of them. We say of each of them without a shadow of hesitation: IF THIS HAD NOT FIRST BEEN A THOUGHT, IT COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A THING. Now, is the Eye or the Hand an instrument adjusted to a certain use, and thus revealing an antecedent purpose in the Creative Mind, or is it not? Can we account for either except by saying that it was thought out before it was wrought

out; that it was a concept in mind ere it could possibly appear as a configuration in matter; that before it became a fact in nature it must needs have been a thought in God? According to Mr. Darwin, we can and ought. Human mind made the prospect-glass, but no mind presided over the structure of the eye. Such mind is dispensed with by natural selection: a sensitive nerve, whence derived is not said, will in millions of ages select itself into an eye! The same solution will of course suffice elsewhere. "The new-born kangaroo is an inch in length, naked, blind, with very rudimental limbs and tail in one which I examined the morning after the birth, I could discern no act of sucking: it hung, like a germ, from the end of the long nipple, and seemed unable to draw sustenance therefrom by its own efforts. The mother accordingly is provided with a peculiar adaptation of a muscle (cremaster) to the mammary gland, by which she can inject the milk from the nipple into the mouth of the pendulous embryo. Were the larynx of the little creature like that of the parent, the milk might, probably would, enter the windpipe and cause suffocation: but the foetal larynx is cone-shaped with the opening at the apex, which projects, as in the whale-tribe, into the back aperture of the nostrils, where

it is closely embraced by the muscles of the 'soft palate.' The air-passage is thus completely separated from the fauces, and the injected milk passes in a divided stream, on either side the base of the larynx, into the œsophagus. These correlated modifications of maternal and foetal structures, designed with especial reference to the peculiar conditions of both mother and offspring, afford, as it seems to me, irrefragable evidence of Creative foresight." 51 "The parts of this apparatus cannot have produced one another; one part is in the mother, another part in the young one; without their harmony they could not be effective; but nothing except design can operate to make them harmonious. They are intended to work together; and we cannot resist the conviction of this intention when the facts first come before us." 52 The significance of such facts, and the legitimacy of such comments, which extend in their principle over the whole field of organization, may be safely left, Mr. Darwin's blindness to them notwithstanding, to the common sense of mankind. The case is too strong to be explained away. Nature is full of plan, and yet she plans not: she is only plastic to a plan. That plan speaks self-attestingly to all healthy understandings. It has its warp indeed as well as its

*Appendix A.

*

woof. The exquisite variety of creative adjustments reposes on a basis of fundamental order: exhaustless specialities of adaptation are engrafted on a pervasive unity of type. But Morphology and Teleology—the recognition of a general Model and of specialized Modes

-can never be justly conceived as at schism till concessions to symmetry in works of human art are pronounced incompatible with a regard to use, or, again, till the skill of the consummate musician is held to be impeached by the simplicity of the strings. 53 Morphology, rightly viewed, is not the negation, but one grand phase of the revelation of plan. Teleology is the other. It has been by following the lamp of Final Cause, and obeying her beckoning hand, that the masters of anatomical and physiological science, from Galen to Cuvier, and from Harvey to Owen, have been guided to their splendid discoveries. 54 The method that is thus scientifically fruitful is, however, the great stumbling-block to all schemes of development, since it is the mainstay and bulwark of Natural Theology. It is impossible to ask, For what? without further asking, From Whom? The measure of the confidence with which Science assumes a use is that of the confidence with which Religion affirms an Author. "He that planted the ear,

shall He not hear? Or He that made the eye, shall He not see?" Not only has this argument been esteemed invulnerable by the most masculine reasoners among Christian divines, as Barrow and Paley, Chalmers and Whewell it has carried conviction, from the time of Socrates to that of Cuvier, throughout the foremost minds of the human race, and found almost its sole antagonists among spinners of cobwebs and dreamers of dreams. * Nowhere is the hallucination of perverted genius more apparent than in the insane vehemence with which Lucretius warns his reader against the imminent danger of being tempted to suppose that eyes were made to see, or feet and legs to walk. Mr. Darwin's more subdued though similar warning will meet, as it merits, a similar fate. The prints of Divine forethought, and the convictions they engender, are scattered over the face of universal nature, and ploughed into the very subsoil of the human mind.

28. On the field of Final Causes, then, with full feeling of the stake yet no fear for the issue, Natural Theology takes her stand, and offers battle to Natural Selection. Her strength is concentrated, though not exhausted, on two main positions. She appeals to the phenomena of animal framework; not only as exem* Appendix B.