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Show 176 DARWINIAN .A. trial just now very useful to scien~e~ an?: we con~lude, not harmful to religion, unless mJudwwus assa1lants temporarily make it so. . . . One good effect is already manifest; 1ts enablmg the advocates of the hypothesis of a multiplicity of human species to perceive the double insecurity of their ground. When the races of men are admitted to ~e _of one species, the corollary, that they are of one ong~n, may be expected to follow. Those who al~ow them to be of one species must admit an actual diversification into strongly-marked and persistent varieties, and so admit the basis of fact .upon which the Darwinian hypothesis is built; while those, on the other hand, who recognize several or numerous human species, will hardly be able to maintain that such species were primordial and supernatural in the ordinary sense of the word. The English mind is prone to positivism and kindred forms of materialistic philosophy, and we must expect the derivative theory to be taken up in tpat interest. We have no predilection for that school, but the contrary. If we had, we might have looked complacently upon a line of criticism which would indirectly, but effectively, play into the hands of positivists and materialistic atheists generally. The wiser and stronger ground to take is, that the derivative hypothesis leaves tlie argument for design, and therefore for a designer, as valid as it ever was ; that to do any work by an instrument. must require, and therefore presuppose, the exertion rather of more than of less power than to do it directly; that whoever would be a consistent theist should believe that Design in the natural DARWIN AND HIS REVIEWERS. 177 world is coextensive with Providence, and hold as firmly to the one as he does to the other, in spite of the wholly similar arid apparently insuperable difficulties whicP, the mind encounters whenever it endeavors to develop the idea into a system, either in the material and organic, or in the moral world. It is enough, in · the way of obviating objections, to show that the philosophical difficulties of the one are the same, and only the same, as of the other. |
