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Show 154 IJARWINIANA. thereby assumes that they are undirected. This is the assumption of the Boston reviewers, and of Mr. Agassiz, who insists that the only alternative to the doctrine that all organized beings were supernaturally creat~d just as they are, is, that they have arisen spontaneously through the omnipotence of matter.x As to all this nothing is easier than to bring out in the conclusio~ what you introduce in the premises. If you import atheism into your concep:ion o~ ;ar!ation and natural selection, you can readily exh1b1t 1t in the result. If you do not put it in, perhaps there need be none to come out. While the mechanician is considering a steamboat or locomotive-engine as a material organism, and contemplating the fuel, water, and steam the source of the mechanical forces, and how ' . . they operate, he may not have occas10~ to mentwn the engineer. But, the orderly and spe~1al r~sults ac; complished, the why the movements are 1n th1s or that particular direction, etc., is inexplicable wi:hout him. If Mr. Darwin believes that the events whiCh he supposes to have occurred and the results we behold were undirected an·d undesigned, or if the physicist believes that the natural forces to which he refers phenomena are uncaused and undirected, no argument is needed to show that such belief is atheism. But the admission of the. phenomena and of these natural processes and forces does not necessitate any such belief, nor even render it one whit less improbable than before. Surely, too, the accidental element may play its part in Nature without negativing design in the the- J In American Journal of Science, July, 1860, pp. 147-149. .. IJARWIN ANIJ HIS REVIEWERS. 155 iit's view. He believes that the earth's surface has been very gradually prepared for man and the existing animal races, that vegetable matter has through a long series of generations imparted fertility to the soil in order that it may support its present occupants, that even beds of coal have been stored up for man's benefit. Yet what is more accidental, and more simply the consequence of physical agencies, than the accumulation of vegetable matter in a peat-bog, and its transformation into coal ? No scientific person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or aeriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast extent, from which the specific existing worlds have been developed one by one. What theist doubts that the actual results of the development in the inorganic worlds are not merely compatible with design, but are in the truest sense designed results? Not Mr. Agassiz, certainly, who adopts a remarkable illustration of design directly founded on the nebular hypothesis, drawing from the position and times of the revolution of the world, so originated, "direct evidence that the physical world has been ordained in conformity with laws which obtain also among living beings." But the reader of the interesting exposition 1 will notice that the designed result has been brought to pass through what, speaking after the manner of men, might be called a chapter of accidents. A natural corollary of this demonstration would 1 In" Contributions to the Natural History of the United States,, vol. i., pp. 128, 129. |
