t action of the mind and will of the
Creator. It is simply a question of how the Creator has worked. The
Duke (and I quote him as having well expressed the views of the more
intelligent of Mr. Darwin's opponents) maintains, that He has personally
applied general laws to produce effects, which those laws are not in
themselves capable of producing; that the universe alone, with all its
laws intact, would be a sort of chaos, without variety, without harmony,
without design, without beauty; that there is not (and therefore we may
presume that there could not be) any self-developing power in the
universe. I believe, on the contrary, that the universe is so
constituted as to be self-regulating; that as long as it contains Life,
the forms under which that life is manifested have an inherent power of
adjustment to each other and to surrounding nature; and that this
adjustment necessarily leads to the greatest amount of variety and
beauty and enjoyment, because it does depend on general laws, and not on
a continual supervision and re-arrangement of details. As a matter of
feeling and religion, I hold this to be a far higher conception of the
Creator and of the Universe than that which may be called the "continual
interference" hypothesis; but it is not a question to be decided by our
feelings or convictions, it is a question of facts and of reason. Could
the change, which Geology shows us has ever taken place in the forms of
life, have been produced by general laws, or does it imperatively
require the incessant supervision of a creative mind? This is the
question for us to consider, and our opponents have the difficult task
of proving a negative, if we show that there are both facts and
analogies in our favour.

_Mr. Darwin's Metaphors liable to Misconception._

Mr. Darwin has laid himself open to much misconception, and has given to
his opponents a powerful weapon against himself, by his continual use of
metaphor in describing the wonderful co-adaptations of organic beings.

"It is curious," says the Duke of Argyll, "to observe the language
which this most advanced disciple of pure naturalism instinctively
uses, when he has to describe the complicated structure of this curious
order of plants (the Orchids). 'Caution in ascribing intentions to
nature,' does not seem to occur to him as possible. Intention is the one
thing which he does see, and which, when he does not see, he seeks for
diligently until he finds it. He exhaust