p or two
ahead, and often not so much as this. The fact, as I have elsewhere
urged, that the man who made the first kettle did not foresee the
engines of the Great Eastern, or that he who first noted the
magnifying power of the dew-drop had no conception of our present
microscopes--the very limited amount, in fact, of design and
intelligence that was called into play at any one point--this does
not make us deny that the steam-engine and microscope owe their
development to design. If each step of the road was designed, the
whole journey was designed, though the particular end was not
designed when the journey was begun. And so is it, according to the
older view of evolution, with the development of those living
organs, or machines, that are born with us, as part of the
perambulating carpenter's chest we call our bodies. The older view
gives us our design, and gives us our evolution too. If it refuses
to see a quasi-anthropomorphic God modelling each species from
without as a potter models clay, it gives us God as vivifying and
indwelling in all His creatures--He in them, and they in Him. If it
refuses to see God outside the universe, it equally refuses to see
any part of the universe as outside God. If it makes the universe
the body of God, it also makes God the soul of the universe. The
question at issue, then, between the Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin and
the neo-Darwinism of his grandson, is not a personal one, nor
anything like a personal one. It not only involves the existence of
evolution, but it affects the view we take of life and things in an
endless variety of most interesting and important ways. It is
imperative, therefore, on those who take any interest in these
matters, to place side by side in the clearest contrast the views of
those who refer the evolution of species mainly to accumulation of
variations that have no other inception than chance, and of that
older school which makes design perceive and develop still further
the goods that chance provides.

But over and above this, which would be in itself sufficient, the
historical mode of studying any question is the only one which will
enable us to comprehend it effectually. The personal element cannot
be eliminated from the consideration of works written by living
persons for living persons. We want to know who is who--whom we can
depend upon to have no other end than the making things clear to
himself and his readers, and whom we should mistr