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 contriver'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 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 inbore conception of Nature as an ordered
system? Furthermore, and above all, can the Darwinian theory itself