the improvement of mankind; yet the race may be designed to improve, and may be actually improving. Or, to avoid the complication with free agency-the whole animate life of a country depends absolutely upon the vegetation, the vegetation upon the rain. The moisture is furnished by the ocean, is raised by the sun's heat from the ocean's surface, and is wafted inland by the winds. But what multitudes of raindrops fall back into the ocean-are as much without a final cause as the incipient varieties which come to nothing! Does it therefore follow that the rains which are bestowed upon the soil with such rule and average regularity were not designed to support vegetable and animal life? Consider, likewise, the vast proportion of seeds and pollen, of ova and young—a thousand or more to one-which come to nothing, and are therefore purposeless in the sanie sense, and only in the same sense, as are Darwin's unimproved and unused slight variations. The world is full of such cases; and these must answer the argument-for we cannot, except by thus showing that it proves too much.

Finally, it is worth noticing that, though natural selection is scientifically explicable, variation is not. Thus far the cause of variation, or the reason why the offspring is sometimes unlike the parents, is just as mysterious as the reason why it is generally like the parents. It is now as inexplicable as any other origination; and, if ever explained, the explanation will only carry up the sequence of secondary causes one step farther, and bring us in face of a somewhat different problem, but which will have the same element of

mystery that the problem of variation has now. Cir cumstances may preserve or may destroy the variations; man may use or direct them; but selection, whether artificial or natural, no more originates them than man originates the power which turns a wheel, when he dams a stream and lets the water fall upon it. The origination of this power is a question about efficient cause. The tendency of science in respect to this ob viously is not toward the omnipotence of matter, as some suppose, but toward the omnipotence of spirit.

So the real question we come to is as to the way in which we are to conceive intelligent and efficient causo to be exerted, and upon what exerted. Are we bound to suppose efficient cause in all cases exerted upon nothing to evoke something into existence-and this thousands of times repeated, when a slight change in the details would make all the difference between suecessive species? Why may not the new species, or some of them, be designed diversifications of the old?

There are, perhaps, only three views of efficient cause which may claim to be both philosophical and theistic:

1. The view of its exertion at the beginning of time, endowing matter and created things with forces which do the work and produce the phenomena.

2. This same view, with the theory of insulated interpositions, or occasional direct action, engrafted upon it-the view that events and operations in general go on in virtue simply of forces communicated at the first, but that now and then, and only now and then, the Deity puts his hand directly to the work.

3. The theory of the immediate, orderly, and con

stant, however infinitely diversified, action of the intelligent efficient Cause.

It must be allowed that, while the third is preëininently the Christian view, all three are philosophi cally compatible with design in Nature. The second is probably the popular conception. Perhaps most thoughtful people oscillate from the middle view toward the first or the third-adopting the first on some Occasions, the third on others. Those philosophers who like and expect to settle all mooted questions will take one or the other extreme. The Examiner inclines toward, the North American reviewer fully adopts, the third view, to the logical extent of maintaining that "the origin of an individual, as well as the origin of a species or a genus, can be explained only by the direct action of an intelligent creative cause." To silence his critics, this is the line for Mr. Darwin to take; for it at once and completely relieves his scientific theory from every theological objection which his reviewers have urged against it.

At present we suspect that our author prefers the first conception, though he might contend that his hypothesis is compatible with either of the threo. That it is also compatible with an atheistic or pantheistic conception of the universe, is an objection which, being shared by all physical, and some ethical or moral science, cannot specially bo urged against Darwin's system. As he rejects spontaneous generation, and admits of intervention at the beginning of organic life, and probably in more than one instance, he is not wholly excluded from adopting the middle view, Although the interventions he would allow are few and

far back. Yet one interposition admits the principlo as well as more. Interposition presupposes particular necessity or reason for it, and raises the question, when and how often it may have been necessary. It might be the natural supposition, if we had only one set of species to account for, or if the successive inhabitants of the earth had no other connections or resemblances than those which adaptation to similar conditions, which final causes in the narrower sense, might ex plain. But if this explanation of organic Nature ro quires one to "believe that, at innumerable periods in the earth's history, certain elemental atoms havo been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues,” and this when the results are seen to be strictly con nected and systematic, we cannot wonder that such interventions should at length be considered, not as interpositions or interferences, but rather to use the reviewer's own language-as “exertions so frequent and beneficent that we come to regard them as the or dinary action of Him who laid the foundation of the carth, and without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground."

What does the difference between Mr. Darwin and his reviewer now amount to? If we say that according to one view the origination of species is natural, according to the other miraculous, Mr. Darwin ngrees that "what is natural as much requires and presup poses an intelligent mind to render it so-that is, to effect it continually or at stated times--as what is su pernatural docs to effect it for once." He merely 1 North American Review for April, 1860, p. 500.

Vide motto from Butler, prefixed to the second edition of Darwin's work.

inquires into the form of the miracle, may remind us that all recorded miracles (except the primal creation of matter) were transformations or actions in and up, on natural things, and will ask how many times and how frequently may the origination of successive spe cies be repeated before the supernatural merges in the

natural.

In short, Darwin maintains that the origination of a species, no less than that of an individual, is natural; the reviewer, that the natural origination of an indi vidual, no less than the origination of a species, roquires and presupposes Divine power. A fortiori, then, the origination of a variety requires and presup poses Divine power. And so between the scientific hypothesis of the one and the philosophical conception of the other no contrariety remains.. And so, concludes the North American reviewer, "a proper view of the nature of causation ... places the vital doctrine of the being and the providence of a God on ground that can never be shaken." thy conclusion, and a suflicient answer to the denun ciations and arguments of the rest of the article, so far as philosophy and natural theology are concerned. If a writer must needs use his own favorite dogma as a weapon with which to give coup de grace to a pernicious theory, he should be careful to seizo his edge. tool by the handle, and not by the blade.

A wor

We can barely glance at a subsidiary philosophical objection of the North American reviewer, which the Examiner also raises, though less explicitly. Like all geologists, Mr. Darwin draws upon time in the 1 North American Review, loc, cit., p. 804.