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Now, the truth or the probability of Darwin's hy. pothesis is not here the question, but only its congruity or incongruity with theism. We need take only one exception to this abstract of it, but that is an important one for the present investigation. It is to the sentence which we have italicized in the earlier part of Dr. Hodge's own statement of what Darwinism is. With it begins our inquiry as to how he proves the doctrine to be atheistic.

First, if we rightly apprehend it, a suggestion of atheism is infused into the premises in a negative form: Mr. Darwin shows no disposition to resolve the efficiency of physical causes into the efficiency of the First Cause. Next (on page 48) comes the positive charge that "Mr. Darwin, although himself a theist," maintains that "the contrivances manifested in the organs of plants and animals . . . . are not due to the continued coöperation and control of the divine mind, nor to the original purpose of God in the constitution of the universe." As to the negative statement, it might suffice to recall Dr. Hodge's truthful remark that Darwin "is simply a naturalist," and that "his work on the origin of species does not purport to be philosophical." In physical and physiological treatises, the most religious men rarely think it necessary to postulate the First Cause, nor are they misjudged by the omission. But surely Mr. Darwin does show the disposition which our author denies him, not only by implication in many instances, but most explicitly where one would naturally look for it, namely—at the close of the volume in question: "To my mind, it accords better with what we know of the laws im

pressed on matter by the Creator," etc. If that does not refer the efficiency of physical causes to the First Cause, what form of words could do so? The positive charge appears to be equally gratuitous. In both Dr. Hodge must have overlooked the beginning as well as the end of the volume which he judges so hardly. Just as mathematicians and physicists, in their systems, are wont to postulate the fundamental and undeniable truths they are concerned with, or what they take for such and require to be taken for granted, so Mr. Darwin postulates, upon the first page of his notable work, and in the words of Whewell and Bishop Butler: 1. The establishment by divine power of general laws, according to which, rather than by insulated interpositions in each particular case, events are brought about in the material world; and 2. That by the word "natural" is meant "stated, fixed, or settled," by this same power, "since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so―i. e., to effect it continually or at stated times as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once." So when Mr. Darwin makes such large and free use of "natural as antithetical to supernatural" causes, we are left in no doubt as to the ultimate source which he refers them to. Rather let us say there ought to be no doubt, unless there are other grounds for it to rest upon.

1

Such ground there must be, or seem to be, to jus tify or excuse a veteran divine and scholar like Dr. Hodge in his deduction of pure atheism from a system

1 These two postulate-mottoes are quoted in full in a previous article, in No. 446 of the Nation (page 259 of the present volume).

produced by a confessed theist, and based, as we have seen, upon thoroughly orthodox fundamental conceptions. Even if we may not hope to reconcile the difference between the theologian and the naturalist, it may be well to ascertain where their real divergence begins, or ought to begin, and what it amounts to. Seemingly, it is in their proximate, not in their ultimate, principles, as Dr. Hodge insists when he declares that the whole drift of Darwinism is to prove that everything "may be accounted for by the blind operation of natural causes, without any intention, purpose, or coöperation of God" (page 64). "Why don't he say," cries the theologian, "that the complicated organs of plants and animals are the product of the divine intelligence? If God made them, it makes no difference, so far as the question of design is concerned, how he made them, whether at once or by process of evolution" (page 58). But, as we have seen, Mr. Darwin does say that, and he over and over implies it when he refers the production of species "to secondary causes," and likens their origination to the origination of individuals; species being series of individuals with greater difference. It is not for the theologian to object that the power which made individual men and other animals, and all the differences which the races of mankind exhibit, through secondary causes, could not have originated congeries of more or less greatly differing individuals through the same

causes.

Clearly, then, the difference between the theologian and the naturalist is not fundamental, and evolution may be as profoundly and as particularly theistic as it is

increasingly probable. The taint of atheism which, in Dr. Hodge's view, leavens the whole lump, is not inherent in the original grain of Darwinism-in the principles posited-but has somehow been introduced in the subsequent treatment. Possibly, when found, it may be eliminated. Perhaps there is mutual misapprehension growing out of some ambiguity in the use of terms. "Without any intention, purpose, or coöperation of God." These are sweeping and effectual words. How came they to be applied to natural selection by a divine who professes that God ordained whatsoever cometh to pass? In this wise: "The point to be proved is, that it is the distinctive doctrine of Mr. Darwin that species owe their origin-1. Not to the original intention of the divine mind; 2. Not to special acts of creation calling new forms into existence at certain epochs; 3. Not to the constant and everywhere operative efficiency of God guiding physical causes in the production of intended effects; but 4. To the gradual accumulation of unintended variations of structure and instinct securing some advantage to their subjects" (page 52). Then Dr. Hodge adduces "Darwin's own testimony," to the purport that natural selection denotes the totality of natural causes and their interactions, physical and physiological, reproduction, variation, birth, struggle, extinction-in short, all that is going on in Nature; that the variations which in this interplay are picked out for survival are not intentionally guided; that "nothing can be more hopeless than the attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class by utility or the doctrine of final causes" (which Dr.

Hodge takes to be the denial of any such thing as final causes); and that the interactions and processes going on which constitute natural selection may suffice to account for the present diversity of animals and plants (primordial organisms being postulated and time enough given) with all their structures and adaptations that is, to account for them scientifically, as science accounts for other things.

A good deal may be made of this, but does it sustain the indictment? Moreover, the counts of the indictment may be demurred to. It seems to us that only one of the three points which Darwin is said to deny is really opposed to the fourth, which he is said to maintain, except as concerns the perhaps ambiguous word unintended. Otherwise, the origin of species through the gradual accumulation of variationsi. e., by the addition of a series of small differencesis surely not incongruous with their origin through "the original intention of the divine mind" or through "the constant and everywhere operative efficiency of God." One or both of these Mr. Darwin (being, as Dr. Hodge says, a theist) must needs hold to in some form or other; wherefore he may be presumed to hold the fourth proposition in such wise as not really to contradict the first or the third. The proper antithesis is with the second proposition only, and the issue comes to this: Have the multitudinous forms of living creatures, past and present, been produced by as many special and independent acts of creation at very numerous epochs? Or have they originated under causes as natural as reproduction and birth, and

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