THE CHOICE OF CAUSES.--We have this choice: To believe that forces by blind action and reaction have evolved the world from a nebulous fire-cloud and peopled it with sentient and intellectual beings, making of it a perpetual motion, a machine not designed, but the result of infinite failures, perfected by infinite blunders, and sustained by the fortuitous equilibrium of unseeing, unknowing forces; or that back of these forces is an intelligence, planning and willing through their agency. If the latter be accepted, it does not follow that the crude conception of design in nature as the direct work of a personal God must be maintained. At the commencement of the great revival of the study of nature, when the views which have revolutionized scientific thought were beginning to dawn, illy defined and partially understood, they were seized on by a class seeking support to the theological doctrines they felt yielding beneath their feet, and distorted by plausible sophistry into apparent vindication of their dogmas. Of these, Paley became most famous, his illustration of the watch was the most renowned of his arguments. It is misleading, as there is no real likeness between a watch and the mechanism of nature. Yet we do not endorse the complacency of many leading supporters of evolution. Evolution is undoubtedly a true statement of the _method_ of creation. It offers no further explanation and gives no cause. Accepting evolution and following the development of life from the least to the greatest, what do we see but the constant unfoldment of a well defined purpose and plan? Are not the beings of the Silurian and Devonian epoch prophecies of the forms which were evolved out of them? We may call things by new names, and in place of design use “adaptation”; we do not change the relations of things thereby. When we see a bird cleave the air with rapid wings, and observe the wonderful adaptation of bones and muscles and forms of feathers, we may explain it all by evolution, which has made the bird the embodiment of the forces of the air. Have we done more than state the method of growth? What cause have we assigned for the process? We see an interminable series of forms, changing from age to age, becoming more and more complex in their relations, but pressing forward constantly to final production of man as the perfection of the vertebrate type. Evolution describes this process, at every step furnishing evidence of a purpose, achieving its ends through matter, often failing, but through failures at last reaching its object. In this light the imperfection of organs proves nothing against design. The eye of man is instanced as more imperfect than a glass lens. It is as perfect as the organic material out of which it is made permits. That it becomes diseased is from the same necessity of organization.