Can we ac

the Creative Mind, or is it not? count 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?"1

14. Can we say that although the prospectglass is the product of mind, yet no mind presided over the structure of the eye? According to Mr. Darwin, we can and ought. And yet Mr. Darwin begins by admitting it to be apparently "in the highest degree absurd to suppose that the eye, with all its INIMITABLE contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection." He then proceeds to indicate some "probable" stages in the process by which, as he believes, the eye was formed— a process of natural selection, and of that alone. His first postulate is, a nerve specially endowed with sensibility to light. The optic

nerve thus-not formed, but-fancied merely, surrounded by pigment cells, and covered by translucent skin, will, in millions of ages, select 1 "The Three Barriers,” pp. 61 et seq.

itself into an eye. Let it be granted :-"in the highest degree absurd" though it be. But the primary postulate-how does Mr. Darwin get that? "How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light," he says, "hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated." Perhaps not: but both questions are studiously evaded when we are left to infer that the nerve made itself, and that life caused itself to live; or, in other words, that both are examples of what Mr. Darwin strangely calls "variation causing alterations."

Take now the several steps of the process as pursued by Natural Selection according to Mr. Darwin; and let but the power competent to do the things which he assumes are done, be credited with sense enough to be aware of its competence, and it may then be regarded as not unlikely to have done some of them on purpose. Whereupon the genesis of the eye ceases to be a mystery. "All the appearances of contrivance that have resulted from the operation find their obvious and complete explanation in the assumption of a contriver, and all such hazy films. as that of variability producing variation cease to be capable of serving as excuses for wilful blindness. And why should not the power in question be so credited? Here is Mr. Darwin's

solitary reason why. He doubts whether the inference implied may not be 'presumptuous.' He apprehends that we have no right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of a man.' Truly, of all suggested modes of marking respect for creative power, that of assuming it to have worked unintelligently is the most original." 1

1

"From what I know, through my own speciality, both geometry and experiment, of the structure of lenses and the human eye, I do not believe that any amount of evolution, extending through any amount of time consistent with the requirements of our astronomical knowledge, could have issued in the production of that most beautiful and complicated instrument, the human eye. There are too many curved surfaces, too many distances, too many densities of the media, each essential to the other, too great a facility of ruin by slight disarrangement, to admit of anything short of the intervention of an intelligent Will at some stage of the evolutionary process. The most perfect, and at the same time the most difficult optical contrivance known is the powerful achromatic object glass of a microscope; its structure is the long-unhoped-for result of the ingenuity of 1 Thornton: "Old-Fashioned Ethics," pp. 238, 239.

many powerful minds; yet in complexity and in perfection it falls infinitely below the structure of the eye. Disarrange any one of the curvatures of the many surfaces, or distances, or densities of the latter; or worse, disarrange its incomprehensible self-adaptive power, the like of which is possessed by the handiwork of nothing human, and all the opticians in the world could not tell you what is the correlative alteration necessary to repair it, and still less to improve it, as natural selection is presumed to imply.'

15. 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 carries with it its own unanswerable attestation to all healthy understandings. It has its warp indeed, as well as its 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. 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

1 Professor Pritchard's Address at the Brighton Congress (1874).

masters of anatomical and physiological science, from Galen to Cuvier, and from Harvey to Owen, have been guided to their splendid discoveries." But the irrepressible question, For what? is naturally followed by the further question, From Whom? The measure of the confidence with which Science assumes a use is the measure 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?" This argument has been esteemed unanswerable, not only by the most masculine reasoners among Christian divines, Barrow and Paley, Chalmers and Whewell: "it has carried conviction, from the time of Socrates to that of Cuvier, to the foremost minds of the human race, and found almost its sole antagonists among spinners of cobwebs and dreamers of dreams. 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."

16. To conclude. Modern Materialism then, as expounded by its ablest advocates, whether under the guise of Positive Agnosticism, or that of Scientific Atheism, has no key to unlock the