ne itself internally and clothe itself externally with
clustered cells, which, by a series of differentiations, traceable
through a number of animalcular varieties, eventually exhibit the
outlines of respiratory and circulatory systems. To me, I repeat, it
seems all but inconceivable, and altogether incredible, that the
intelligence which willed these cellular divisions, multiplications, and
differentiations to take place, did not foresee what would be their
results, and did not will them for the sake of those results. And if I
do not deem it still more incredible that there should be _natural_
selection separating the fittest for survival by accumulating upon them
slight advantages which qualify them to survive, without there being at
the same time a _nature_, or other exalted intelligence, however
designated, which selects, and which accumulates advantages upon the
objects of its selection, _in order_ that they may survive, it is only
because I consider the extremest limits of credibility to have been
already passed. But I forget. On reflection I perceive that I am doing
scant justice to the elasticity of philosophic belief. How far this is
capable of stretching on occasion, let one or two notable Darwinian
specimens show.

No single piece of organic mechanism is oftener or more confidently
appealed to by Theists as rendering conclusive evidence on their side
than the eye, nor would they run much risk by allowing sentence to go
for or against them according as Mr. Darwin has or has not succeeded in
his attempt to explain that evidence away. Possibly he may disclaim
having made any attempt of the kind, and I must admit that it is less by
what he says than by what he leaves unsaid, that he lays himself open to
the charge. Indeed, in almost all he says on the subject, I myself
cordially agree, embracing even some of his views with less of
hesitation than he seems to have felt in putting them forward. He seems
to me, for instance, to have somewhat gratuitously admitted it to be
apparently 'in the highest degree absurd to suppose that the eye, with
all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different
distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the
correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed
by natural selection.' For since, as he proceeds unanswerably to argue,
'numerous gradations, from an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect
and complex, each grade being us