r from simpler to more complex mutual
adjustment was unwelcome to this teleology. If the adaptation was traced
to the influence, through competition, of the environment, the old
teleology lost an illustration and a proof. For the cogency of the proof
in every instance depended upon the absence of explanation. Where the
process of adaptation was discerned, the evidence of Purpose or Design
was weak. It was strong only when the natural antecedents were not
discovered, strongest when they could be declared undiscoverable.

Paley's favourite word is "Contrivance"; and for him contrivance is
most certain where production is most obscure. He points out the
physiological advantage of the valvulae conniventes to man, and the
advantage for teleology of the fact that they cannot have been formed by
"action and pressure." What is not due to pressure may be attributed to
design, and when a "mechanical" process more subtle than pressure was
suggested, the case for design was so far weakened. The cumulative proof
from the multitude of instances began to disappear when, in selection,
a natural sequence was suggested in which all the adaptations might be
reached by the motive power of life, and especially when, as in Darwin's
teaching, there was full recognition of the reactions of life to the
stimulus of circumstance. "The organism fits the niche," said the
teleologist, "because the Creator formed it so as to fit." "The organism
fits the niche," said the naturalist, "because unless it fitted it
could not exist." "It was fitted to survive," said the theologian.
"It survives because it fits," said the selectionist. The two forms of
statement are not incompatible; but the new statement, by provision of
an ideally universal explanation of process, was hostile to a doctrine
of purpose which relied upon evidences always exceptional however
numerous. Science persistently presses on to find the universal
machinery of adaptation in this planet; and whether this be found in
selection, or in direct-effect, or in vital reactions resulting in large
changes, or in a combination of these and other factors, it must always
be opposed to the conception of a Divine Power here and there but not
everywhere active.

For science, the Divine must be constant, operative everywhere and in
every quality and power, in environment and in organism, in stimulus and
in reaction, in variation and in struggle, in hereditary equilibrium,
and in "the unstable state of