"Those highly magnifie Him, whose judicious inquiry into His Acts, and deliberate research into His Creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration." ― BROWNE, "Religio Medici." 66 LECTURE XIII LOUIS AGASSIZ AND GEORGE BERKELEY WHETHER the Origin of Species has or has not any bearing on the argument from design, it clearly has very obvious and positive bearing on certain arguments that have been thought to prove design; although belief that nature gives evidence of intention may be held by those who doubt whether it affords any proof of contrivance of any use of instruments — that is not itself a part of the order of nature. While every phase of the teleological argument which our faculties permit has, no doubt, been considered by shrewd thinkers long ago, the work of Wallace and Darwin has brought clearly and distinctly before all the question whether it is contrivance -the use of means or instruments, and the overcoming of difficulties -or nature itself, which the teleologists believe to prove design. So far as the limitations of human speech are adequate to put it into words, the peculiar teleological problem of the nineteenth century seems to be whether we must prove contrivance, or interference with nature, in order to show intention; for it is now clear to us, as it never has been before, that, even if it be not impossible, it is very difficult to show the occurrence of any planning or contriving that is not itself a part of the orderly course of nature, admitting of a mechanical explanation; nor does it seem judicious or clear sighted to base natural theology upon anything else than nature. These two elements, the argument from contrivance, and the argument from intention, are sometimes distinguished by the writers on natural theology, although none of them, so far as I can discover, keeps the distinction clearly and constantly in mind. In fact, most of them seem to me to so entangle these two points of view as to show that they fail to attach any importance to the distinction. between them; although two great thinkers, George Berkeley and Louis Agassiz, base their reasoning upon nature itself, rather than upon evidence of contrivance in nature. Agassiz's Essay on Classification, the last of the notable works on natural theology, was published in 1857, as part of his "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States." The writer was a man of transcendent genius for scientific discovery, with intense earnestness and enthusiasm for the pursuit of truth, and rare eloquence and literary skill. If any man was devoted to the cause of truth and determined to accept it whatever it might prove to be, that man was Agassiz; for while his impulses were notably devout and reverential, he proved, on many occasions, that he was fearless and independent in the search for truth. It is no disparagement to Buckland, and Bell, and Chalmers, and the other authors of the Bridgewater Treatises to assert that Agassiz far surpassed them all in acquaintance with the methods which lead to success in the interpretation of nature, and in ability to treat the problems of natural theology from the standpoint of the zoölogist. He handles the subject in a far more comprehensive way than any of these writers, for he does not hesitate to assert that their attempts to find evidence of design in the contrivances of living bodies is unscientific and wrong in principle. "The argument for the existence of an intelligent Creator," he tells us, "is generally drawn from the adaptation of means to ends, upon which the Bridgewater Treatises, for example, have been based. But this does not appear to me to cover the whole ground, for we can conceive that the natural action of objects upon each other should result in a final fitness of the universe, and thus produce a harmonious whole; nor does the argument derived from the connection of organs and functions seem to me more satisfactory, for beyond certain limits it is not even true." He therefore attempts to put natural theology upon a much broader basis; for he finds reason to believe that the facts which are studied by the naturalist the phenomena of geological succession and geographical distribution, of embryology and anatomy, of systematic botany and zoology; in a word, all the data of the natural sciences are a language in which the Creator tells us the story of creation for our delight and instruction and advantage; and that when we use such phrases as the "language of nature," and the "interpretation of nature," our words are not figurative, but literal. It is not because we find contrivances in nature, but because the order of nature is one consistent and harmonious whole, that he holds it to be intended. "In their respective great types, the phenomena of animal life correspond to one another, whether we compare their rank as determined by structural complication with the phases of their growth, or with their succession in past geological ages; whether we compare this succession with their embryonic growth, or all these different relations with each other and with the geographical distribution of animals upon earth. The same series everywhere! The connection, however, between the facts, it is easily seen, is only intellectual, and implies, therefore, the agency of Intellect as its first cause." He holds that this truth is most clearly shown by those systematic affinities which make out of the individual animals and plants a consistent and harmonious whole, a realm of nature; and he calls his work an Essay on Classification. "The division of animals according to branch, class, order, family, genius, and species, by which we express the results of our investigation into the relations of the animal kingdom, and which constitute the first question respecting the systems of Natural History which we have to consider, seems to me to deserve the consideration of all thoughtful minds. Are these divisions artificial or natural? Are they the devices of the human mind to classify and arrange our knowledge in such a manner as to bring it more readily within our grasp and facilitate further investigation, or have they been instituted by the Divine Intelligence as categories of his mode of thinking? Have we perhaps thus far been only the unconscious interpreters of a Divine conception, in our attempts to expound nature? and when, in our pride of philosophy, we thought we were inventing systems of science, and classifying creation by the force of our own reason, have we followed only, and reproduced, in our imperfect expressions, the plan whose foundations in the dawn of creation, and the development of which, we are laboriously studying, -thinking as we arrange our frag |