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 variations--i.e., by the addition of a series
of small differences--is 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 no more so, by the variation and change of
preceding into succeeding species?
Those who accept the latter alternative are evolutionists. And Dr. Hodge
fairly allows that their views, although clearly wrong, may be genuinely
theistic. Surely they need not become the less so by the discovery or by
the conjecture of natural operations through which this diversification and
continued adaptation of species to conditions is brought about. Now, Mr.
Darwin thinks--and by this he is distinguished. from most
evolutionists--that he can assign actual natural causes, adequate to the
production of the present out of the preceding state of the animal and
vegetable world, and so on backward--thus uniting, not indeed the beginning
but the far past with the present in one coherent system of Nature. But in
assigning actual natural causes and processes, and applying them to the
explanation of the whole case, Mr. Dar-win assumes the obligation of
maintaining their general sufficiency--a task from which the numerous
advocates and acceptors of evolution on the general concurrence of
probabilities and its usefulness as a working hypothesis (with or without
much conception of the manner how) are happily free. Having hit upon a
modus operandi which all who understand it admit will explain something,
and many that it will explain very much, it is to be expected that Mr.
Darwin will make the most of it. Doubtless he is far from pretending to
know all the causes and operations at work; he has already added some and
restricted the range of others; he probably looks for additions to their
number and new illustrations of their efficiency; but he is bound to expect
them all to fall within the category of what he calls natural selection (a
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