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Show I 'I 66 D A.R WIN IAN A. than their parents, will cross or interbreed with those who have the same organs a little less sensitive, a~d thus the mean standard will be kept up without ap.y advancement. If our billiard-table were sufficiently extensive, i. e .. , infinite, the balls rolled from the corners would never meet, and the necessity which we have supposed to deflect them would never act. The moment, however, that the want of space or food commences natural selection begins. Here the balls meet, and all future action is governed by necessity. The best forms, or those nerves ri:wst sensitive to light, connected with incipient membranes and humors for corneas and. lenses, are picked out and preserved by natural selection, of necessity. All cannot live and propagate, and it is a necessity, obvious to all, that the weaker must perish, if the theory be true. Working on, in this way, through countless generations, the eye is at last formed in all its beauty and excellence. It must (always assuming that this theory is true) result from this combined action of natural variation, the struggle for life, and natural selection, with as much certainty as the balls, after collision, must pass to corners of the table different from those to which they were directed, and so far forth as the eye is formed by these laws, acting upward from the nerve merely sensitive to light, we can no more infer design, and from design a designer,· than 'Ye can infer design in the direction of the billiard- bans after the collision. Both are sufficiently accounted for by blind powers acting under a blind necessity. Take away the struggle for life from the one, and the collision of the balls from the other-and DESIGN ·vERSUS NECESSITY. ·67 neither of these was designed-and the animal would have gone on without eyes. The balls would have found the corners of the table to which they were first directed. While, therefore, it seems to me clear that one who can find no proof of the existence of an intelligent Creator except through the evidence of design in the organic world, can find no evidence of such design in the construction of the eye, if it were constructed under the operation of Darwin's laws, I shall not for one moment contend that these laws are ilncompatible with design and a self-conscious, intelligent Creator. Such design might, indeed, have coexisted with the necessity or natural selection; and so the billiard-players might have designed the collision of their balls ; but neither the formation of the eye, nor the path of the balls after collision, furnishes any sufficient proof of such design in either case. One, indeed, who believes, from revelation or any other cause, in the ex~stence of such a Creator,- the fountain and source of all things in heaven above and in the earth beneath, will see in natural variation, the struggle for life, and natural selection, only the order or mode in which this Creator, in his own perfect wisdom, sees fit to act. : Happy is he who can thus see and adore. But how many are there who have no such belief from intuiti"on, or faith in revelation; but who have by careful and elaborate search in the physical, and more especially in the organic world, inferred, by induction, the existence of God from what has seemed to them the wonderful adaptation of the different organs and parts of the animal body to Hs, |
