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science, involving the absurdity of incorporating a metaphysical dogma with a fabric of natural science. To this bit of transubstantiation even Mr. Gladstone committed himself when, in his famous address at the Shaw-street College, he declared that in our time, "upon the ground of what is termed evolution, God is relieved of the labour of creation." 17 Darwinism, as a scientific entity, is an exposition of certain laws of nature; whether a true or false exposition must be decided by considerations germane to its own argument. It is not a Theistic or anti-Theistic, much less an Atheistic, system, whatever conclusions may be embraced on these subjects by Mr. Darwin and his followers or adherents. It is quite possible that Mr. Darwin, or any other evolutionist, may consider that he can deduce certain conclusions adverse to theism from his observations of nature. If he chooses to commit the absurdity of affirming that he has proved the non-existence of design, I can only wonder at the portentous metaphysical blunder which he perpetrates, but I am certainly under no obligation to assume that this palpable non-sequitur is a legitimate or essential portion of his scheme.

It is plain, I admit, that Mr. Darwin, in his eagerness to bring all the phenomena of life under the operation of the laws of natural selection and evolution, has sometimes used language inconsistent with the ideas of theism and of design. If God created the universe and impressed its laws upon it, I, as a theist, am justified in believing that He intended the result, and I have a right to seek for divine ideas and purposes in nature. 18 But Mr. Darwin is impatient with

17 Address at the Liverpool Collegiate Institution, December 21st, 1872. 18The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the

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the feeble moralisings which natural theologians have often indulged in, and, in his reaction against their tendency to pick and choose among natural facts only those which support their own foregone conclusions, he has unnecessarily denied their logic, and used language which seems to imply that nature has nothing to teach us about God at all. On the other hand, it is equally plain that Mr. Darwin is not himself an atheist, since in many passages in his writings he refers to God as the origin and source of all things. In the Origin of Species he uses these words: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. A celebrated author and divine has written to me, that he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the void caused by the action of His laws.' ›› 19 And in the final sentence of this book Mr. Darwin observes: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved." 20 In the Descent of Man, Mr. Darwin remarks of the question, "whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe," that it "has been answered in the affirmative by the highest intellects that have ever existed." 21 It is difficult for me to believe that a man of such transcendent

teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe."-Professor Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 1873, p. 307.

19 Origin of Species, 5th edition, 1869, p. 569. 20 Origin of Species, 5th edition, 1869, p. 579. 21 Descent of Man, 2nd edition, 1874, p. 94.

frankness and honesty would use these words without comment if he meant to dissent from the conclusion stated. Throughout the Descent of Man, moreover, Mr. Darwin treats of religion as one of the loftiest and most beneficent agencies in the improvement and progression of the species, which he cannot consistently do if he considers the fundamental proposition of religion-that God exists--a mistake. In view of these admissions and expressions of Mr. Darwin, it is eminently unfair to charge him with atheism. The accusation is equally groundless in the case of other evolutionists. Speaking of those who hold the hypothesis, Professor Tyndall says: "They have but one desire-to know the truth. They have but one fear-to believe a lie. They have as little fellowship with the atheist who says there is no God, as with the theist who professes to know the mind of God." 22 It is, then, an unmanly thing to attempt to fix the stigma of atheism upon the expounders of the evolution theory. Nearly all of them are reverent theists. "I believe," says Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, "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 depends 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." Agreeing with Mr.

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22 Discourse on "Scientific Use of the Imagination," British Association, Liverpool, 1870, reprinted in Fragments of Science, 6th edition, vol. 2, p. 135-6.

28 Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, 1870, p. 265-6.

Wallace that the hypothesis of evolution must stand or fall as the evidence may determine, I agree also with him that Darwinism not only does not deny God, not only does not remove God farther off from the universe, but, proving Him as acting by constant and permanent law, gives to us a nobler conception of Him as the imminent cause and ever-living and present Being. Were we to have proof that every form of life, vegetable and animal, from diatom and rhizopod to man, had sprung from one solitary cell by a process of natural selection, so far from losing sight of God, we should be guided along the actual path through which His creative energy accomplished its perfect work, and hear the very song of the morning stars when the foundations of the earth were fastened and the corner-stone thereof laid, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. The possibilities of growth contained within that primal cell would testify at least as marvellously to the glory of the Lord as a myriad separate creations of independent species. The doctrine of development is an endeavour to explain the method of creation, and can no more be held to dispense with a Creator than an explanation of the metre of a song can be construed into a denial of the existence of a poet. The persistent uplifting of types of being, from epoch to epoch, would prove the ceaseless activity of a living spirit, working out a definite purpose, and manifesting Himself with an ever-brightening glory.

THE INFLUENCE OF LITERATURE UPON THE GROWTH OF RELIGION AND LAW.

BY H. LONGUET HIGGINS.

A MARKED intellectual feature of the present age is its study of Development. We are no longer satisfied with studying things as they are; we wish to know how and when they grew up, and what causes and influences have shaped, arrested, or accelerated that growth. The study of growth is indeed a profoundly interesting one, and it is to the development of two great systems of human thought, and to what is conceived to have been a powerful, though unappreciated, influence upon them, that your attention is invited in the present paper.

When we consider the immense part played in human affairs by Literature, which in its widest sense signifies the whole written thought of Man, and when we remember that the possession of a literature is one of the broad distinctions between civilised and uncivilised races, it would seem at first sight not a little remarkable that this great institution, Literature—itself a product of the human mind, and therefore a proper subject for psychological study -has received but little scientific attention. Yet so it is. But it is still more strange that language itself, the material of literature, has only very recently been considered as worthy of scientific investigation for its own sake, and not merely as a key to ancient and foreign wit and wisdom. Again, admitting that Literature is worthy of psychological study, let us remember that Psychology herself has but recently ascended from the mist of Metaphysics into the clear atmosphere of Science. This very circumstance is a psychological fact of great interest. It shows that the pro

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