least his own self. If he says he rejects, in consequence of his own doctrine of natural selection, all that has been understood, and is understood, as design, then it is not for any other man to say the contrary. In fact, it is impossible for any man who reads these three volumes of the Life and Letters, not to see that it was the one special pride of Mr. Darwin to think that he had brought the organic world to the same level as the inorganic world-" now that the law of natural selection has been discovered!" This, too, is equally the pride of many of his followers: natural selection has brought all to the single uniformity of natural (that is, physical) law, materialism.

Now, I have no wish whatever to present the consequences of a doctrine as refutation of that doctrine-if otherwise validly established as a doctrine. Though it is so in mathematics that the reductio ad absurdum is accomplished, "imputed consequences" have not always any such consummation elsewhere. What alone I regard here is truth and fact. Still, just in this name in the name of truth and fact, it is a right that what doctrine is now before us should be understood, not only in itself, but in all that pertains to it. Now the end of the doctrine of natural selection-the end of the thought of Mr. Darwin is only this matter and natural (mechanical) law in matter. Beyond that Mr. Darwin cannot go. It is mere rubbish," he says (iii. 18)," thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter;"" and as to the origin of matter (p. 236), I have never troubled myself about such insoluble questions." It is just possible that what is insoluble here, may not be so insoluble elsewhere. But that does not concern us at present. What we would point out now rather is thisthat what is implied as an objection to the theory of Mr. Darwin, does not necessarily on that account in the

same way lie against all other, so-called, evolutionary doctrines. Philosophy itself must be allowed to amount at last to no more than, in a certain way, an evolutionary doctrine.

In 1859, it appears that the Rev. Charles Kingsley was one of those favoured jurymen to whom Mr. Darwin sent his new book. One of Mr. Kingsley's paragraphs in thanks runs thus: "I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self-development into all forms needful pro tempore and pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made. I question whether the former may not be the loftier thought." This view of Mr. Kingsley's in fact falls under the general statement in Hume to which, as I refer (Lectures, p. 272), Erasmus Darwin assented, but from which it proved convenient for the moment to David himself, elsewhere in his own writing, to seem to dissent, namely, that it argues more wisdom in the Deity" to contrive a creation on general principles from the first, and "more power" to delegate authority to these principles, "than to operate everything by His own immediate volition." Kant's celebrated Theory of the Heavens, in which he is supposed to have anticipated both Herschel and Laplace in regard to what is called the nebular hypothesis, has much of these same ideas; and as in Hume and the others, so in him, it all comes to the single thought that the antedating of the Divine interference neither removes nor lessens it. Now, as it is simply in the light and heat of that thought that Mr. Kingsley, further, exultingly exclaims, "Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by the mere force of truth and fact," so it is pretty well with the same preparation of 1 Above at p. 54 also.

mind that I oppose what Mr. Kingsley supports. "Let God be true, and every man a liar!" That is what Kingsley says in support of what the doctrine is to him, namely: and that is what I say in opposition to it. "Let us know what is," he says again, "and, as old Socrates has it, eπeobai To λóy." That, too, I say, and perhaps with a far other intensity of conviction. But in truth the Moyos, the reasoning, that Kingsley believes himself to follow, is not at all Darwin's λóyos, Darwin's reasoning. Primal forms created, capable of self-development into all other forms, that is "the noble conception of Deity," "the loftier thought" that is Charles Kingsley's; but it is neither the conception nor the thought of Charles Darwin. The whole infinite life around us, of plants, and animals, and man, whether in sea, or earth, or air, is but the product of so much physical necessity, mere mechanical arrangement on mere mechanical chance. All follows in this world, even for life, even for thought, just as the wind that blows. There is natural law, physical law; and Mr. Darwin would know no other. The origin of matter is insoluble; but there it is, and it has fallen of itself, mechanically, into globes, on which globes there has come to be much mechanical evolution, both animate and inanimate, but all of it, always, and in all respects, physical. Charles Kingsley postulates a Deity-postulates an evolution, certainly to him, as it were "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful;" but what in either respect does Charles Darwin not find himself cease to postulate? Charles Darwin is emphatically good; and it becomes very evident that he is not always and with all men at ease in the unbelief which he feels forced to. Sympathy is a need of Mr. Darwin's own very nature; and hence, in his own goodness and courtesy, he cannot help passages in his writing that would bespeak, now and then, the appearance of

vacillation; but Charles Darwin-really-as little vacillates internally, that is here as anywhere else in what concerns his theory. On the contrary, he is true to his conviction always; and ever, from stage to stage, it only grows. He says once, for example, as we saw (ii. 373), I have been led to think more on this subject (design), and grieve to say that I come to differ more from you." With all his courtesy and gentleness, Darwin was singularly simple, singularly honest, and singularly brave. He could not be happy if he thought any one made a mistake of his opinions, and all the less if these opinions were attributed to his supposed credit. He must speak ; silence was impossible to him. 'I had no intention to write atheistically," he says once to Asa Gray; "but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us." "It is not that designed variation," he continues, “makes, as it seems to me, my deity 'Natural Selection' superfluous, but-from seeing what an enormous field of undesigned variability "—and that undesigned variability means to Mr. Darwin only accident and chance

"there is ready for natural selection to appropriate." That is not the Deity of Charles Kingsley who created primal forms with laws of innate self-development. Mr. Darwin will have no such innate and internal law; he will only have an adventitious and external law. On his system (ii. 176), "only diversified variability" is required, but not any “aboriginal" "power" or "principle.” In the Origin, too, there is this strong statement: "The mere lapse of time by itself does nothing, either for or against natural selection: I state this because it has been erroneously asserted that the element of time has been assumed by me to play an all-important part in modifying species, as if all the forms of life were necessarily undergoing change through some innate law." Innate

law, aboriginal principle, Mr. Darwin will have none such he will have only a casual variation in an organism, which, casually somehow also, is found to involve connection with nature in an additional relation.

Now, as we see, such an evolutionist as Charles Kingsley has not the remotest dream of all this. He believes in an original creation in the beginning and at the first, to the simple evolution of which we owe the innumerable species that now are. These, then, were not separately created, but merely evolved. And as Charles Kingsley was, it cannot be doubted that many evolutionists still are. They have no suspicion that if they are Darwinians their creed otherwise must simply be, and cannot but be, as Mr. Darwin's own. Mr. Darwin's own! And that means that Mr. Darwin was proud to think that, even as Sir Isaac Newton had reduced to a single everyday natural necessity the whole infinitude of the inanimate, so he, Charles Darwin, had similarly reduced to a single everyday natural contingency the whole infinitude of the animate itself. Το Newton there might be an innate law in the things themselves, and to Newton there might be a God who created the things themselves. But to Darwin neither the one nor the other was a need. It may be right to say "law of natural selection; if a constantly recurring fact may be called a law-the fact of limitless natural variation, only, no less limitlessly, naturally applied. Still it is the "undesigned," spontaneous,

unaccountable, mere mechanical consecution that constitutes the fact, while it is the constancy of the process that makes the law. And so it is that Mr. Darwin has no need even of the innate law of Newton; while as for a God, the God of Newton, the God of Design, we have already seen that Mr. Darwin almost directly says instead (ii. 373), "my deity Natural Selection."