"At the same time," continues Professor Mivart, "it is freely conceded that the destructive agencies in nature do succeed in preventing the perpetuation of monstrous, abortive, and feeble attempts at the performance of the evolutionary process, that they rapidly remove antecedent forms when new ones are evolved more in harmony with surrounding conditions, and that their action results in the formation of new characters when these have once attained sufficient completeness to be of real utility to their possessor.
"Continued reflection, and five years further pondering over the problems of specific origin have more and more convinced me that the conception, that the origin of all species 'man included' is due simply to conditions which are (to use Mr. Darwin's own words) 'strictly accidental,' is a conception utterly irrational."
"With regard to the conception as now put forward by Mr. Darwin, I cannot truly characterize it but by an epithet which I employ only with much reluctance. I weigh my words and have present to my mind the many distinguished naturalists who have accepted the notion, and yet I cannot hesitate to call it a '_puerile hypothesis_.'"[370]
I am afraid I cannot go with Professor Mivart farther than this point, though I have a strong feeling as though his conclusion is true, that "the material universe is always and everywhere sustained and directed by an infinite cause, for which to us the word mind is the least inadequate and misleading symbol." But I feel that any attempt to deal with such a question is going far beyond that sphere in which man's powers may be at present employed with advantage: I trust, therefore, that I may never try to verify it, and am indifferent whether it is correct or not.
Again, I should probably differ from Professor Mivart in finding this mind inseparable from the material universe in which we live and move. So that I could neither conceive of such a mind influencing and directing the universe from a point as it were outside the universe itself, nor yet of a universe as existing without there being present--or having been present--in its every particle something for which mind should be the least inadequate and misleading symbol. But the subject is far beyond me.