No one can tell a story so charmingly as Mr. Darwin, but I can no more believe that all this has come about without design on the part of the orchid, and a gradual perception of the advantages it is able to take over the bee, and a righteous determination to enjoy them, than I can believe that a mousetrap or a steam-engine is the result of the accumulation of blind minute fortuitous variations in a creature called man, which creature has never wanted either mousetraps or steam-engines, but has had a sort of promiscuous tendency to make them, and was benefited by making them, so that those of the race who had a tendency to make them survived and left issue, which issue would thus naturally tend to make more mousetraps and more steam-engines.
Pursuing this idea still further, can we for a moment believe that these additions to our limbs—for this is what they are—have mainly come about through the occasional birth of individuals, who, without design on their own parts, nevertheless made them better or worse, and who, accordingly, either survived and transmitted their improvement, or perished, they and their incapacity together?
When I can believe in this, then—and not till then—can I believe in an origin of species which does not resolve itself mainly into sense of need, faith, intelligence, and memory. Then, and not till then, can I believe that such organs as the eye and ear can have arisen in any other way than as the result of that kind of mental ingenuity, and of moral as well as physical capacity, without which, till then, I should have considered such an invention as the steam-engine to be impossible.
“A DISTINGUISHED zoologist, Mr. St. George Mivart,” writes Mr. Darwin, “has recently collected all the objections which have ever been advanced by myself and others against the theory of natural selection, as propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself, and has illustrated them with admirable art and force” (“Natural Selection,” p. 176, ed. 1876). I have already referred the reader to Mr. Mivart’s work, but quote the above passage as showing that Mr. Mivart will not, probably, be found to have left much unsaid that would appear to make against Mr. Darwin’s theory. It is incumbent upon me both to see how far Mr. Mivart’s objections are weighty as against Mr. Darwin, and also whether or not they tell with equal force against the view which I am myself advocating. I will therefore touch briefly upon the most important of them, with the purpose of showing that they are serious as against the doctrine that small fortuitous variations are the origin of species, but that they have no force against evolution as guided by intelligence and memory.