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In a review of Darwin's volume on the "Fertilization of Orchids" (too technical and too detailed for reproduction here), and later in a brief sketch of the character of his scientific work (art. x., p. 284), we expressed our sense of the great gain to science from his having brought back teleology to natural history. In Darwinism, usefulness and purpose come to the front again as working principles of the first order; upon them, indeed, the whole system rests.

To most, this restoration of teleology has come from an unexpected quarter, and in an unwonted guise; so that the first look of it is by no means reassuring to the minds of those who cherish theistic views of Nature. Adaptations irresistibly suggesting purpose had their supreme application in natural theology. Being manifold, particular, and exquisite, and evidently inwrought into the whole system of the organic world, they were held to furnish irrefragable as well as independent proof of a personal designer, a divine originator of Nature. By a confusion of thought, now obvious, but at the time not unnatural, they were also regarded as proof of a direct execution of the contrivver's purpose in the creation of each organ and organism, as it were, in the manner man contrives and puts together a machine-an idea which has been set up as the orthodox doctrine, but which to St. Augustine and other learned Christian fathers would have savored of heterodoxy.

In the doctrine of the origination of species through natural selection, these adaptations appear as the outcome rather than as the motive, as final results rather London, 1862.

than final causes. Adaptation to use, although the very essence of Darwinism, is not a fixed and inflexible adaptation, realized once for all at the outset; it includes a long progression and succession of modifications, adjusting themselves to changing circumstances, under which they may be more and more diversified, specialized, and in a just sense perfected. Now, the question is, Does this involve the destruction or only the reconstruction of our consecrated ideas of teleology? Is it compatible with our seemingly inborn conception of Nature as an ordered system? Furthermore, and above all, can the Darwinian theory itself dispense with the idea of purpose, in the ordinary sense of the word, as tantamount to design?

From two opposing sides we hear the first two questions answered in the negative. And an affirmative response to the third is directly implied in the following citation:

"The word purpose has been used in a sense to which it is, perhaps, worth while to call attention. Adaptation of means to an end may be provided in two ways that we at present know of: by processes of natural selection, and by the agency of an intelligence in which an image or idea of the end preceded the use of the means. In both cases the existence of the adaptation is accounted for by the necessity or utility of the end. It seems to me convenient to use the word purpose as meaning generally the end to which certain means are adapted, both in these two cases and in any other that may hereafter become known, provided only that the adaptation is accounted for by the necessity or utility of the end. And there seems no objection to the use of the phrase 'final cause' in this wider sense, if it is to be kept at all. The word 'design' might then be kept for the special case of adaptation by an intelligence. And we

may then say that, since the process of natural selection has been understood, purpose has ceased to suggest design to instructed people, except in cases where the agency of man is independently probable."-P. C. W., in the Contemporary Review for September, 1875, p. 657.

The distinction made by this anonymous writer is convenient and useful, and his statement clear. We propose to adopt this use of the terms purpose and design, and to examine the allegation. The latter comes to this: "Processes of natural selection" exclude "the agency of an intelligence in which the image or idea of the end precedes the use of the means;" and since the former have been understood "purpose has ceased to suggest design to instructed people, except in cases where the agency of man is independently probable." The maxim "L'homme propose, Dieu dispose," under this reading means that the former has the monopoly of design, while the latter accomplishes without designing. Man's works alone suggest design.

But it is clear to us that this monopoly is shared with certain beings of inferior grade. Granting that quite possibly the capture of flies for food by Dionaa and the sundews may be attributed to purpose apart from design (if it be practicable in the last resort to maintain this now convenient distinction), still their capture by a spider's-web, and by a swallow on the wing, can hardly "cease to suggest design to instructed people." And surely, in coming at his master's call, the dog fulfills his own design as well as that of his master; and so of other actions and constructions of brute animals.

Without doubt so acute a writer has a clear and

sensible meaning; so we conclude that he regards brutes as automata, and was thinking of design as coextensive merely with general conceptions. Not concerning ourselves with the difficulty he may have in drawing a line between the simpler judgments and affections of man and those of the highest-endowed brutes, we subserve our immediate ends by remarking that the automatic theory would seem to be one which can least of all dispense with design, since, either in the literal or current sense of the word, undesigned automatism is, as near as may be, a contradiction in terms. As the automaton man constructs manifests the designs of its maker and mover, so the more efficient automata which man did not construct would not legitimately suggest less than human intelligence. And so all adaptations in the animal and vegetable world which irresistibly suggest purpose (in the sense now accepted) would also suggest design, and, under the law of parsimony, claim to be thus interpreted, unless some other hypothesis will better account for the facts. We will consider, presently, if any other does so.

We here claim only that some beings other than men design, and that the adaptations of means to ends in the structure of animals and plants, in so far as they carry the marks of purpose, carry also the implication of having been designed. Also, that the idea or hypothesis of a designing mind, as the author of Nature-however we came by it-having possession of the field, and being one which man, himself a designer, seemingly must needs form, cannot be rivaled except by some other equally adequate for explana

tion, or displaced except by showing the illegitimacy of the inference. As to the latter, is the common apprehension and sense of mankind in this regard well grounded? Can we rightly reason from our own intelligence and powers to a higher or a supreme intelligence ordering and shaping the system of Nature?

A very able and ingenious writer upon "The Evidences of Design in Nature," in the Westminster Review for July, 1875, maintains the negative. His article may be taken as the argument in support of the position assumed by "P. C. W.," in the Contemporary Review above cited. It opens with the admission that the orthodox view is the most simple and apparently convincing, has had for centuries the unhesitating assent of an immense majority of thinkers, and that the latest master-writer upon the subject disposed to reject it, namely, Mill, comes to the conclusion that, "in the present state of our knowledge, the adaptations in Nature afford a large balance of probability in favor of creation by intelligence." It proceeds to attack not so much the evidence in favor of design as the foundation upon which the whole doctrine rests, and closes with the prediction that sooner or later the superstructure must fall. And, truly, if his reasonings are legitimate, and his conclusions just, "Science has laid the axe to the tree."

"Given a set of marks which we look upon in human productions as unfailing indications of design," he asks, "is not the inference equally legitimate when we recognize these marks in Nature? To gaze on such a universe as this, to feel our hearts exult within us in the fullness of existence, and to offer in explanation of such beneficent provision no other word but

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