Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification | Page 4

ends, must have had a large share in the development of the life we saw around us; it seemed indisputable that the minds and bodies of all living beings must have come to be what they are through a wise ordering and administering of their estates. We could not, therefore, dispense either with descent or with design, and yet it seemed impossible to keep both, for those who offered us descent stuck to it that we could have no design, and those, again, who spoke so wisely and so well about design would not for a moment hear of descent with modification.
Each, moreover, had a strong case. Who could reflect upon rudimentary organs, and grant Paley the kind of design that alone would content him? And yet who could examine the foot or the eye, and grant Mr. Darwin his denial of forethought and plan?
For that Mr. Darwin did deny skill and contrivance in connection with the greatly preponderating part of organic developments cannot be and is not now disputed. In the first chapter of "Evolution Old and New" I brought forward passages to show how completely he and his followers deny design, but will here quote one of the latest of the many that have appeared to the same effect since "Evolution Old and New" was published; it is by Mr. Romanes, and runs as follows:-
"It is the VERY ESSENCE of the Darwinian hypothesis that it only seeks to explain the APPARENTLY purposive variations, or variations of an adaptive kind." {17a}
The words "apparently purposive" show that those organs in animals and plants which at first sight seem to have been designed with a view to the work they have to do--that is to say, with a view to future function--had not, according to Mr. Darwin, in reality any connection with, or inception in, effort; effort involves purpose and design; they had therefore no inception in design, however much they might present the appearance of being designed; the appearance was delusive; Mr. Romanes correctly declares it to be "the very essence" of Mr. Darwin's system to attempt an explanation of these seemingly purposive variations which shall be compatible with their having arisen without being in any way connected with intelligence or design.
As it is indisputable that Mr. Darwin denied design, so neither can it be doubted that Paley denied descent with modification. What, then, were the wrong entries in these two sets of accounts, on the detection and removal of which they would be found to balance as they ought?
Paley's weakest place, as already implied, is in the matter of rudimentary organs; the almost universal presence in the higher organisms of useless, and sometimes even troublesome, organs is fatal to the kind of design he is trying to uphold; granted that there is design, still it cannot be so final and far-foreseeing as he wishes to make it out. Mr. Darwin's weak place, on the other hand, lies, firstly, in the supposition that because rudimentary organs imply no purpose now, they could never in time past have done so--that because they had clearly not been designed with an eye to all circumstances and all time, they never, therefore, could have been designed with an eye to any time or any circumstances; and, secondly, in maintaining that "accidental," "fortuitous," "spontaneous" variations could be accumulated at all except under conditions that have never been fulfilled yet, and never will be; in other words, his weak place lay in the contention (for it comes to this) that there can be sustained accumulation of bodily wealth, more than of wealth of any other kind, unless sustained experience, watchfulness, and good sense preside over the accumulation. In "Life and Habit," following Mr. Mivart, and, as I now find, Mr. Herbert Spencer, I showed (pp. 279-281) how impossible it was for variations to accumulate unless they were for the most part underlain by a sustained general principle; but this subject will be touched upon more fully later on.
The accumulation of accidental variations which owed nothing to mind either in their inception, or their accumulation, the pitchforking, in fact, of mind out of the universe, or at any rate its exclusion from all share worth talking about in the process of organic development, this was the pill Mr. Darwin had given us to swallow; but so thickly had he gilded it with descent with modification, that we did as we were told, swallowed it without a murmur, were lavish in our expressions of gratitude, and, for some twenty years or so, through the mouths of our leading biologists, ordered design peremptorily out of court, if she so much as dared to show herself. Indeed, we have even given life pensions to some of the most notable of these biologists, I suppose in order to reward them for