most expansible principle), or to be congruous with it--that is, that they
shall be natural causes. Also--and this is the critical point--he is bound
to maintain their sufficiency without intervention.
Here, at length, we reach the essential difference between Darwin, as we
understand him, and Dr. Hodge. The terms which Darwin sometimes uses, and
doubtless some of the ideas they represent, are not such as we should adopt
or like to defend; and we may say once for all--aside though it be from the
present issue--that, in our opinion, the adequacy of the assigned causes to
the explanation of the phenomena has not been made out. But we do not
understand him to deny "purpose, intention, or the cooperation of God" in
Nature. This would be as gratuitous as unphilosophical, not to say
unscientific. When he speaks of this or that particular or phase in the
course of events or the procession of organic forms as not intended, he
seems to mean not specially and disjunctively intended and not brought
about by intervention. Purpose in the whole, as we suppose, is not denied
but implied. And when one considers how, under whatever view of the case,
the designed and the contingent lie inextricably commingled in this world
of ours, past man's disentanglement, and into what metaphysical dilemmas
the attempt at unraveling them leads, we cannot greatly blame the
naturalist for relegating such problems to the philosopher and the
theologian. If charitable, these will place the most favorable construction
upon attempts to extend and unify the operation of known secondary causes,
this being the proper business of the naturalist and physicist; if wise,
they will be careful not to predicate or suggest the absence of intention
from what comes about by degrees through the continuous operation of
physical causes, even in the organic world, lest, in their endeavor to
retain a probable excess of supernaturalism in that realm of Nature, they
cut away the grounds for recognizing it at all in inorganic Nature, and so
fall into the same condemnation that some of them award to the Darwinian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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