PDF - Wallace Online

144 NATURAL SELECTION vnwhich those laws are not in themselves capable of producing ;that the universe alone, with all its laws intact, would bea sort of chaos, without variety, without harmony, withoutdesign, without beauty; that there is not (and therefore wemay presume that there could not be) any self -developingpower in the universe. I believe, on the contrary, that theuniverse is so constituted as to be self-regulating ;that aslong as it contains Life, the forms under which that life ismanifested have an inherent power of adjustment to eachother and to surrounding nature and that this ; adjustmentnecessarily leads to the greatest amount of variety and beautyand enjoyment, because it does depend on general laws, andnot on a continual supervision and rearrangement of details.As a matter of feeling and religion, I hold this to be a farhigher conception of the Creator and of the Universe thanthat which may be called the "continual interference"hypothesis but it is not a; question to be decided by ourfeelings or convictions it is a question of facts and of reason.Could the change which geology shows us has continuallytaken place in the forms of life, have been produced by generallaws, or does it imperatively require the incessant supervisionof a creative mind ? This is the question for us to consider,and our opponents have the difficult task of proving a negative,if we show that there are both facts and analogies inour favour. 1Mr. Darwin's Metaphors liable to MisconceptionMr. Darwin has laid himself open to much misconception,and has given to his opponents a powerful weapon againsthimself, by his continual use of metaphor in describing thewonderful co-adaptations of" organic beings.It is curious," says the Duke of Argyll, " to observe thelanguage which this most advanced disciple of pure naturalisminstinctively uses, when he has to describe the complicatedstructure of this curious order of plants (the Orchids).'Caution in ascribing intentions to nature ' does not seem to1In addition to the laws referred to above, there are of course the fundamentallaws and properties of organised matter and the mysterious powers ofLife, which we shall probably never be able to explain, but which must betaken as the basis of all attempts to account for the details of form andstructure in organised beings.