creation, he admits a
dualism as between God and the world. Neither is he a Materialist,
inasmuch as he assumes a supernatural origin for the infinitesimal
modicum of life and intelligence in the primordial animalcule, from
which without divine purpose or agency, all living things in the whole
history of our earth have descended. All the innumerable varieties of
plants, all the countless forms of animals, with all their instincts and
faculties, all the varieties of men with their intellectual endowments,
and their moral and religious nature, have, according to Darwin, been
evolved by the agency of the blind, unconscious laws of nature. This
infinitesimal spark of supernaturalism in Mr. Darwin's theory, would
inevitably have gone out of itself, had it not been rudely and
contemptuously trodden out by his bolder, and more logical successors.

The grand and fatal objection to Darwinism is this exclusion of design
in the origin of species, or the production of living organisms. By
design is meant the intelligent and voluntary selection of an end, and
the intelligent and voluntary choice, application, and control of means
appropriate to the accomplishment of that end. That design, therefore,
implies intelligence, is involved in its very nature. No man can
perceive this adaptation of means to the accomplishment of a
preconceived end, without experiencing an irresistible conviction that
it is the work of mind. No man does doubt it, and no man can doubt it.
Darwin does not deny it. Haeckel does not deny it. No Darwinian denies
it. What they do is to deny that there is any design in nature. It is
merely apparent, as when the wind of the Bay of Biscay, as Huxley says,
"selects the right kind of sand and spreads it in heaps upon the
plains." But in thus denying design in nature, these writers array
against themselves the intuitive perceptions and irresistible
convictions of all mankind,--a barrier which no man has ever been able
to surmount. Sir William Thomson, in the address already referred to,
says: "I feel profoundly convinced that the argument of design has been
greatly too much lost sight of in recent zooelogical speculations.
Reaction against the frivolities of teleology, such as are to be found,
not rarely, in the notes of the learned commentators on 'Paley's Natural
Theology,' has, I believe, had a temporary effect of turning attention
from the solid irrefragable argument so well put forward in that
excellent old book.