| OCR Text |
Show 158 DARWINIAN A. mystery that the problem of variation has now. Circumstances may preserve or may destroy the variations; man may use or direct them; but selection, whether artificial or natural, no more originates them than man originates the power which turns a wheel, when he dams a stream and lets the water fall upon it. The origination of this power is a question about efficient ca~se. The tendency of science in respect to this obviously is not toward the omnipotence of matter, as some suppose, but toward the omnipotence of spirit. So the real question we .come to is as to tl).e way in which we are to conceive intelligent and efficient cause to be exerted, and upon what exerted. Are we bound to suppose efficient cause in all cases exerted upon nothing to evoke something into existence-and this thousands of times repeated, when a slight change in the details would make a.ll the difference between successive species~ Why may not the new species, or some of them, be desig?-ed diversifications of the old~ There are, perhaps, only three views of efficient cause which may claim to be both philosophical and theistic: 1. The view of its exertion at the beginning of time, endowing matter and created things with forces which do the work and produce the phenomena. 2. This same view, with the theory of insulated interpositions, or occasional direct action, engrafted upon it~the view that events and operations in general go on in virtue simply of forces communicated at the first, but that now and then, and only now and then, the Deity puts his hand directly to the work. 3. The theory of the immediate, orderly, and con- DARWIN AND HIS REVIEWERS. 159 stant, however infinitely diversified, action of the intelligent efficient Cause. It must be allowed that, while the third is preeminently the Christian view, all three are philosophically compatible with design in Nature. The second is probably the popular conception. Perhaps most thoughtful people oscillate from the middle view toward the first or the third-adopting the first on some occasions, the third on others. Those philosophers who like and expect to settle all mooted questions will take one or the other extreme. The Examiner inclines toward, the North American reviewer fully adopts, the third view, to the logical extent of maintaining that " the origin qf an individual, as well as the origin of a species or a genus, can be explained only by the direct action of an intelligent creative cause." To silence his critics, this is the line for Mr. Darwin to take; for it at once and completely relieves his scientific theory from every theological objection which his reviewers have urged against it. At present we suspect that our author prefers the first conception, though he might contend that his hypothesis is compatible with either of the three. That it is also compatible with an atheistic or pantheistic conception of the universe, is an objection which, being shared by all physical, and some ethical or moral science, cannot specially be urged against Darwin's system. As he rejects spontaneous generation, and admits of intervention at the beginning of organic life, and probably in more than one instance, he is not wholly excluded from adopting the mid<He view, although the interventions he would allow are few and |
