language purposely, because it is the only language that satisfies the demands of the case), and that a rose became a lily, or a lily a rose, by some external power called “natural selection,”--I reply that I shall believe this when I see it; that a modifying influence is one thing, and a plastic force another; and that, as an able Hegelian philosopher remarks,[81.1] a selection producing not a random but a reasonable result always implies some principle of selection, and a selecting agency--that is, the Socratic designing Intellect. But there are greater names than those of Comte and Darwin, who have been quoted as oracular denouncers of all teleology--two of the greatest indeed of all modern names. Bacon and Goethe. The dictum of the great father of modern physical science, that teleology is a barren virgin, has been often repeated. Now, as Bacon was a pious man, at least a religious philosopher, he certainly cannot have meant Atheism by this; what then did he mean? {82} This question will be best answered by considering what Bacon’s attitude as a philosopher was. He was not, like Aristotle, a calm judicial speculator, making a tabulated register of all knowledge; he was rather like Martin Luther, a man of war; and as the ecclesiastical reformer’s life and doctrine derive all their significance from the abuses of the Papacy which they overthrew, so Bacon’s position as a polemical thinker is to be interpreted only with reference to the school of thinking which he attacked. That school was a school fruitful in theories, discussions, and sounding generalities of all kinds, which afforded ample exercise to intellectual athletes, but produced no practical result. To put an end to this vague and unprofitable talk, the British Bacon, with the same practical instinct which guided the Attic Socrates, though in an opposite direction, set himself to establish a scientific method, a method specially calculated by the interrogation of nature to ascertain facts, and from the careful comparison of facts to educe laws. With these investigations into elementary scientific facts the general philosophical principle of final causes had nothing directly to do; nay, it might even act perniciously in an age which had not yet learned the art of careful experiment by accustoming men in an indolent sort of way to spin ingenious theories about the final causes of certain arrangements in the universe, before they had taken pains to ascertain what these arrangements actually were. And when we consider how vast a machine the Cosmos is, and how great the ignorance of us curious emmets who set ourselves to interpret its hieroglyphics, and to spell its scripture, it will be obvious that a warning against the ready luxury of speculating on final {83} causes was one of the most necessary utterances that might come from the mouth of a reformer of scientific method. However far men may rise through the long gradation of secondary causes up to the First Cause, and by the slow