prove that He acts for the good of His creatures. He also acts by laws
which we can study and comprehend. Acting by law, and under what is called
final causes, comprehends, I think, your whole principle. You write of
"natural selection" as if it were done curiously by the selecting agent.
'Tis but a consequence of the presupposed development, and the subsequent
battle for life. This view of nature you have stated admirably, though
admitted by all naturalists and denied by no one of common sense. We all
admit development as a fact of history: but how came it about? Here, in
language, and still more in logic, we are point-blank at issue. There is a
moral or metaphysical part of nature as well a physical. A man who denies
this is deep in the mire of folly. 'Tis the crown and glory of organic
science that it DOES through FINAL CAUSE, link material and moral; and yet
DOES NOT allow us to mingle them in our first conception of laws, and our
classification of such laws, whether we consider one side of nature or the
other. You have ignored this link; and, if I do not mistake your meaning,
you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it. Were it
possible (which, thank God, it is not) to break it, humanity, in my mind,
would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into
a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its
written records tell us of its history. Take the case of the bee-cells.
If your development produced the successive modification of the bee and its
cells (which no mortal can prove), final cause would stand good as the
directing cause under which the successive generations acted and gradually
improved. Passages in your book, like that to which I have alluded (and
there are others almost as bad), greatly shocked my moral taste. I think,
in speculating on organic descent, you OVER-state the evidence of geology;
and that you UNDER-state it while you are talking of the broken links of
your natural pedigree: but my paper is nearly done, and I must go to my
lecture-room. Lastly, then, I greatly dislike the concluding chapter--not
as a summary, for in that light it appears good--but I dislike it from the