Paley, in company with all the scientific investigators of his day, was ignorant of the considerations which are now forcing upon the world the question of the derivative origin of species as well as that of individuals. But he was not so short-sighted as to base his argument on the mode of origination. When one individual gives birth to another, it is only "in some sense the maker" of it.

He is "asking for the cause of that subserviency to a use, that relation to an end, which we have remarked in the watch before us. No answer is given to this question by telling us that a preceding watch produced it."1 Still farther on in the chapter Paley contends that supposing one watch to have been produced from another watch, and "that from a former, and so on indefinitely," "does not, even though we go ever so far," "bring us any nearer to the least degree of satisfaction on the subject." The difficulty is not diminished by removing it farther back.

"A chain composed of an infinite number of links can no more support itself than a chain composed of a finite number of links. And of this we are assured, though we never can have tried the experiment, because, by increasing the number of links, from ten, for instance, to a hundred, from a hundred to a thousand, etc., we make not the slightest approach, we observe not the smallest tendency, towards self-support." a

3

In the case of one watch being produced by another, Paley denies that " we have [in that fact] any cause whatever ..... for the design, the contrivance, the suitableness of means to an end." The real effect of discovering such an origin. would be to "increase beyond measure our admiration of the skill which had been employed in the formation of such a machine." But, while Paley satisfactorily disposed of the objections to his argument on the ground that individuals are propagated from each other, it could not be expected that he should altogether anticipate a somewhat different line of objection, subsequently arising out of a belief that living species have a genetic connection with one another. If individuals. are endowed not merely with the power of producing other individuals exactly after their kind, but of producing them

1 Paley's Natural Theology, chap. ii., sec. 3.

2 Ibid., sec. 4.

* Ibid., sec. 5.

with variations of such a kind, and so correlated to their environment, that there shall be improvement in the organization, this, as Professor Gray early contended, compels an extension of the Paleyan argument for a designer.

We are fully aware of a remarkable passage, in which Paley is thought by some to assert that he would throw up his whole style of reasoning if such an hypothesis as that of Mr. Darwin should be established. The passage is as follows:

"There is another answer which has the same effect as the resolving of things into chance, which answer would persuade us to believe that the eye, the animal to which it belongs, every other animal, every plant, indeed every organized body which we see, are only so many out of the possible varieties and combinations of being which the lapse of infinite ages has brought into existence; that the present world is the relic of that variety; millions of other bodily forms and other species having perished, being, by the defect of their constitution, incapable of preservation, or of continuance by generation." 1

If Paley had written in our day, he would no doubt have guarded his phraseology with more care. But even as it is, the section, as a whole, plainly indicates that the Lucretian theory of fortuitous development was in view. For in his more explicit statement, on the following page, we read:

"The hypothesis teaches, that every possible variety of being hath, at one time or other, found its way into existence, — by what cause or in what manner is not said, — and that those which were badly formed perished; but how or why those which survived should be cast, as we see that plants and animals are cast, into regular classes, the hypothesis does not explain; or, rather, the hypothesis is inconsistent with this phenomenon."

Now, Mr. Darwin, in our day, has brought forward an hypothesis which purports to be consistent with this phenomenon. On this hypothesis, - suggested by observation, - of a wide range of variability, correlated to a complicated series of changing conditions which do not neutralize the effect of the tendency to variation, but direct and intensify it, naturalists are attempting to account for the definite direction in which species have progressed, and the "regular classes" in which they are cast. Yet this can be no hap-hazard process,

1 Natural Theology, chap. v., sec. 4.

however concealed from our plodding intellects. No one can suppose that all possible events have occurred. The farthest

one could go in that direction would be to surmise that all events possible under the present system of nature had come to pass; but that would be a very different thing. Like all illustrations, the one we are now going to bring forward is very unsatisfactory in some respects; but it is truthful to the main point. Each single variation in the hypothesis of Mr. Darwin is like an explosion of gunpowder, determinate in its tendency only as there is a gun barrel to direct its force.

Had the modern speculations concerning the derivative origin of species been promulgated when Paley wrote, there can be little doubt that our American naturalist would have been anticipated in his supposition of the watch whose immemediate descendants produced better watches, and whose remote descendants gave birth to a chronometer and a town clock. The question in natural theology raised by Darwinism does not disturb the argument for an intelligent designer, but pertains only to the times and modes in which the forces of design are introduced. It also modifies in some degree the interpretation of that design. How little the students of natural theology have to fear this theory of the origin of species, will appear when attention is directed to the contrivance and foresight of a higher power demanded by this theory, not so apparently in the construction of each particular part of the organic and balanced whole, when taken singly, as in the construction and preservation of the whole itself, which should incorporate and retain these contrivances and adaptations among its parts.

If Paley is open to criticism in one point more than in another, it is in this: that he does not make sufficiently prominent the a fortiori nature of his argument. To come down from the "Cosmos" to a watch, to find design, seems like labor lost, since the one is so infinitely inferior to the other. Furthermore, the watch reveals two separate things which we are likely to confound, namely, design, and man's

method of executing design. Making such a comparison prominent incurs the danger of encouraging conceptions of God which are too anthropomorphic, both as to the narrowness of the design contemplated and as to the means of attaining the end.

III. Life does not exist or continue by Necessity.

The profoundly mysterious power of life, somehow introduced into the world, is adjusted on the Darwinian hypothesis to the other forces which have operated co-ordinately with it. We can easily conceive that at any time since its introduction, changes in these co-ordinate powers might have altogether extinguished life itself. The theory of pangenesis, which is derided by some as absurd, has only that degree of absurdity that pertains to any attempt to state in comprehensive, material figures of speech the marvellous facts concerning the manifestations of life.

We are aware that at this point we are likely to be told that there is no more propriety in speaking of the "power of life" and "vitality" than in speaking of the "power of aquosity" in water. For the sake of the argument we are willing to grant it. But certainly the " power of aquosity" is something. Water is not a necessary existence, even when all the elements in its composition abound. Oxygen and hydrogen are not water, till other and a whole congeries of powers have brought them in to a particular relation to each other; and then they are held in that relation only so long as certain conditions are preserved. The word "aquosity" because superfluous, is not senseless. But no one would contend that there is not a far greater manifestation of power, and an inconceivably more delicate adjustment of conditions required in the production and perpetuation of living organisms, especially those of a higher grade, than in the production of water. As water is more than oxygen and hydrogen, so a living organism is more than oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and whatever other chemical elements enter into it. If any one says that living organisms exist in nature by virtue

of necessity, we ask by what necessity? Chance knows no necessity. There can be no necessity in the outcome of Nature except such as is put into her operations. The reasoner never can get so far back in the chain of secondary causation that he is not compelled to posit a nature and conditions which involve in their operations all present phenomena. We by no means admit that philosophers have reduced, or ever can reduce, all phenomena to two or three elementary forms of motion. But if they should do so, they will not have reduced the amount of intelligence necessary to work out of these so-called simple motions the present complicated results and adaptations; for since the days of Aristotle we have rather heard that wisdom was most manifest in the power of accomplishing wonderful results by simplest means.

Let us now look more closely at the Darwinian hypothesis, and see if it in any manner excludes design.

Life is not, according to this hypothesis, a product of the present conditions of existence. It comes down from the past through a mysterious power of propagation. Life is a power co-ordinate with the other natural forces, and clothes itself in material forms which accord both with the nature of the inner principles and of the conditions. A living principle, capable, to a limited extent, of transforming other material powers, is set in motion. To maintain its existence this. principle has to run the gauntlet of all the changes that take place in such a world as this. This power of life may be compared to a rove of cotton, and the conditions of life to the spinning-jenny and the combined machinery of a cottonmill. The nature of the product depends on a vast complication of movements and adaptations, from those of the waterwheel to those which secure the proper tension of the thread. All these movements are independently adjusted with reference to the nature of the cotton. Too much tension will break the thread, too little would loop it.

The Darwinian supposition is, that life has been so adjusted to the changing conditions of the material forces of the