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WHAT TO BELIEVE IN SCIENCE: TELEOLOGY OR EVOLUTION.

BY THE REV. T. R. R. STEBBING, M.A.

THE

HE Science which deals with the evidences of design or purpose is Teleology, the science of final causes. A final cause is that for the sake of which anything is produced or done. The old lady who found a burglar in her store-closet, asked him for the final cause of his presence in that singular situation when she said, "What brings you here, sir?" In answering, "Why, ma'am, one must be somewheres," he evidently adopted the theory that all things, the movements of human beings included, are not by purpose but by chance, and that therefore it was idle under any circumstances to ask the reason why. Of that theory Archdeacon Paley effectually disposed many years ago, in his famous and popular treatise on Natural Theology. His whole argument is an argument from final causes. The same argument, and after much the same method, is pursued in another delightful book, the Bridgewater Treatise on "The Hand; its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as evincing Design," by Sir Charles Bell. No one, indeed, will believe that the flexor perforans of the finger found its way through the flexor perforatus only by accident, just where the confined space of the narrow elongated digit made it all but essential that one of these muscles should pass through a hole in the other. No one, understanding the anatomy of the arm, and how the phalanges of the fingers are bent and straightened chiefly by muscles lying along the front and back of the forearm, would for a moment admit that the long terminal tendons of those muscles are bound down by the annular ligament at the wrist only through a lucky coincidence.

We are content, and may well be so, to recognise personal agency and design in the construction of a watch, a microscope, a steam-engine, without having seen them made or knowing the makers; and since we are surrounded by contrivances analogous, though in important particulars superior, to these contrivances, many of them long antecedent to the

origin of man, and far beyond his skill to invent or even imitate, the inference so often drawn seems a fair and legitimate inference, that personal agency and design underlie all that, for convenience of language or from reverential motives, we call the works of Nature.

From the great conclusion, based on Teleology, that Nature, Creation, the Order of the Universe, has arisen not from chance but by design, we turn then to other conclusions, supposed to be grounded likewise on Teleology, and maintained by the same eminent writers who have shed so much lustre on the first part of the argument.

These authors were concerned to prove not only that design was visible in Nature, but that, out of many ways which the mind à priori might conceive as possible, the Designer had chosen one particular way, in preference to all other ways, of effecting his purpose. It is needless to conceal that they were led to maintain this line of argument by the impression existing in their minds that the Designer had Himself declared his choice of plan, and that therefore his honour was involved in the truthfulness of the declaration. They deemed it necessary, then, to their purpose, to show two things: first, that this particular plan had in fact been pursued; and secondly, that upon a broad general view, and as far as the human intellect and human science could judge, this plan was of all conceivable plans the very best. We propose to join issue with them on both these points, and to show that the teaching of Teleology is in favour of a different plan from that which they thought must have been followed; different, we say, from theirs, yet equally consistent with supreme wisdom and goodness.

On whatever plan the Universe may have been contrived and ordered, a finite intellect scanning and gauging it, not as a whole, but part by part, observing only infinitesimally small portions of it at any one time, and most of it never, can scarcely fail to be impressed with what some would call imperfection and contrariety in the scheme, but what others would more logically as well as more reverently describe as problems awaiting solution, as mysteries not to be frivolously blasphemed because impenetrable or unsatisfactory to a particular order of intelligence. But this doctrine, undeniable as it surely is, throws its ægis equally over every theory of creation, protecting all equally from à priori objections. We are really concerned with nothing except the facts of the casefacts gradually emerging, slowly revealing themselves, or being revealed, to the prophets and apostles and poets of science, with their strange gifts beyond the run of common men; gifts of heroic patience and self-denial, by which, with sure steps though slow, they penetrate the innermost arcana of the

world, showing more and more clearly with every advance that no part of it all is useless or uncared for, but all teeming with marvellous work, with the stamp and impress of purpose, with the signs of an omnipresent intelligence.

Opinions about the actual course of Nature have changed many times, and with each change the religious philosopher has still acknowledged, as he was bound to acknowledge, its wisdom and goodness under each disguise or change of guise; whether he thought that the round earth had been made so sure that it could not be moved, or knew it to be engaged incessantly in rapid and varied motion; whether he thought the earth a circular plain dotted with hills and surrounded by an ocean river, or knew it to be an oblate spheroid; whether he believed the sun and moon to have been created three or four days after the earth's redemption from chaos, or believed that particular opinion to be utterly absurd; whether he thought that no other animals had ever existed on the earth than such as we now know, or was aware that multitudes of other genera and species had long ago died out; whether he believed the earth's crust to have been formed only by fiery agencies or only through the instrumentality of water, or knew it to have been formed by neither of these exclusively; whether he believed the granite rocks to be primeval, the strong foundations of the earth whereon all its outer covering rested and had been built up, or knew that granite-rocks had been continually forming in all geological periods;-through all these changes of opinion he continued, as to our view he was bound to continue, stedfast in loyalty to one belief-that, however the world had been made, it had been made wisely and had been made well.

We propose, then, to consider the theory of the world's history which the old writers on Teleology maintained, and to contrast it with the theory which they rejected. Sir Charles Bell says expressly: "Everything declares the species to have its origin in a distinct creation, not in a gradual variation from some original type; and any other hypothesis than that of a new creation of animals suited to the successive changes in the inorganic matter of the globe--the condition of the water, and atmosphere, and temperature-brings with it only an accumulation of difficulties." * But it is now abundantly clear that "the changes in the inorganic matter of the globe" of which Sir Charles Bell speaks have not taken place suddenly and at long intervals, as he supposed; they have been continuous and unceasing; they are working now. We need not witness Etna and Vesuvius in eruption to be aware of these changes. The boy who "in a showerful spring stares at the spate" may see

Bell, "On the Hand," p. 166.

the chalk or mud washing down the slopes, and gradually wearing away the "everlasting hills." The engineer may run his iron road under the strong cliff and on the lip of the ocean, saying to its liquid mass, "Hitherto shalt thou come, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed;" but with the winter. frost and in the winter storm the cliff falls and the waves beat on, turning dry land into sea; while elsewhere the costly light-house, built also on the edge of the shore for a beacon to the mariner, in the course of years is left far inland by the receding waters. By this gradual redistribution of land and water, by gradual changes of elevation and depression, by the slow diversion of hot and cold currents, and by other causes likewise operating slowly, the temperature of the earth's surface is diversified, not as a whole, but by gradual interchange of climate between its several portions. Regions now temperate in other days have known the perennial glacier and the iceberg; and the same regions now temperate, then glacial, at yet another time have reared in their warm enduring summers the grateful shade of palm-trees. The frozen North, treeless as it now is, once abounded in timber and foliage within a few degrees of the Pole.

If, then, Sir Charles Bell could fairly argue that sudden changes in the inorganic matter of the globe, in the condition of the water, the atmosphere and temperature, pointed clearly to successive creations, not the gradual variation of species, may we not as fairly infer from the changes which are now proved to have been gradual instead of sudden that gradual variation of species is more likely to have prevailed than successive creation? Certainly the teleologist cannot claim the point in favour of his argument from design if, while the outward conditions of life are constantly changing, species have been so stubbornly organised that they can make no change in correspondence. But emphatically he can claim the point in favour of his argument if he finds that not only have living organisms at any one period of the world's history been admirably suited to the condition of the world at that period, but that living organisms have been so marvellously constituted that, as time rolls on and climates change, and means of subsistence vary, and the whole face of the earth is altered, species too-which seem to shortlived and shortsighted observers rigidly fixed and unalterable-can adapt themselves by infinite variations to the ceaseless flow of circumstances. What is the adaptation of a few bones and muscles in the arm and hand for the advantage of a single animal, compared with this argument from the adaptation of all the living species on the globe, not to a single set of conditions, but to a never-ending variety.

Paley conceived the possibility of our planet revolving with

out any permanent axis of rotation. "The effect," he says, "of this unfixedness and instability would be, that the equatorial parts of the earth might become the polar, or the polar the equatorial, to the utter destruction of plants and animals, which are not capable of interchanging their situations, but are respectively adapted to their own."* His idea was, that upon some particular spot of the earth's surface each organism, as we now know it, was abruptly called into existence out of the dust of the earth; in one place a whale, in another a gudgeon, here a monkey and there a man. For instance, in one place he reproaches his fellow-men, saying, "We invade the territories of wild beasts and venomous reptiles, and then complain that we are infested by their bites and stings." And having read that some extensive plains in Africa are almost entirely covered with serpents, he exclaims, "These are the natures appropriated to the situation. Let them enjoy their existence; let them have their country." According to this doctrine the extermination of wolves from England was an act of impiety; and when we fumigate our houses to rid them of animals smaller indeed than wolves but almost equally objectionable, though obeying the laws of comfort we are defying the prescriptions of Nature. Believing, as Paley did, and as so many persons continue to believe with him, that the ancestor of each species was a fixed and finished design, like a watch as it comes from the hands of the watchmaker, only with the faculty which no human machinery ever had, of producing copies of itself, it was natural for him also to believe, and believing to fancy he perceived, that Nature had a special care for preserving these designs, preserving them in the places for which they were specially designed, and preserving them unaltered. He contemplates arrangements "for the preventing of the loss of certain species from the universe; a misfortune," he says, "which seems to be studiously guarded against." "Though there may be the appearance of failure," he continues, "in some of the details of Nature's works,

in her great purposes there never are. Her species never fail." It is certain that he is utterly wrong in the majority of these conclusions. The climates which he thought fixed for the different quarters of the globe have beyond all doubt been con tinually, or even continuously, varying. Plants and animals have not been destroyed, as he thought they must be, by such changes; one reason, though not the only reason, being, that plants and animals, which he thought were not capable of interchanging their situations, undoubtedly are capable of these migrations. The extinction of species is not studiously guarded against by Nature, and her species do fail. Within historical

• Paley, "Natural Theology," ed. 1837, p. 312.

† Paley, "Natural Theology," p. 378.