Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/106

96 Had this protoplasm self-consciousness? I rather think that neither Prof. Huxley nor Prof. Tyndall would say that it had. Animals from the very first have sensations, and also, at least the higher ones, ideas and very curious instincts, by which they make provision for coming evils of which they can have no conception. Finally, in the last of the unnumbered ages we have man with his intelligence, his conscience and free-will, all attested by consciousness. Will evolutionists pretend that on any rational or inductive principle they can tell Low these new powers came into being and into action? When the book of Genesis tells us how these agencies did come in, and in particular how man appeared, science has and can have no facts to lead us to discredit it.

3. There is Final Cause in Nature.—Laplace, a great mathematician but not a great philosopher, imagined that, when we have discovered an efficient, it is not necessary to seek for a final cause. Aristotle, with a much more enlarged conception of the nature of the universe, maintained that we are to seek for both these causes—and for two others besides, the material and the formal. The fact is, that final causes presuppose efficient causes; and the efficient causes effect, by their coöperation, the final cause. We argue final cause, that is design, from the collocation of efficient causes to promote an evident end, say the ear to hear and the eye to see. The doctrine of development does not undermine or in any way interfere with the argument from design. This was asserted by Hugh Miller when the "Vestiges of Creation" was published, and has been gracefully illustrated and defended by Prof. Asa Gray in his pleasant book, "Darwiniana." When we argue that a watch has had a maker, we do not suppose it necessary that the watch should have been made by an immediate fiat of the mechanic. We so infer, because we discover agents combined to produce a particular effect, and the combination of these may have taken days or weeks of patient labor. So, the fact that the present adaptations and forms of the plant and animal may have been produced by a great number of antecedents, acting through ages, does not show that there is no design, but rather proves that there has been a bountiful end contemplated all along, and effected by a long process. Prof. Huxley, in the opening of his last lecture, has expressed his admiration—an admiration with which I thoroughly sympathize—of the structure of the horse: "The horse is in many ways a most remarkable animal, inasmuch as it presents us with an example of one of the most perfect pieces of machinery in the animal kingdom. In fact, among mammalia it cannot be said that there is any locomotive so perfectly adapted to its purpose, doing so much work with so small a quantity of fuel, as this animal, the horse." He speaks of the beauty of the animal arising "from the perfect balance of his parts and the rhythm and perfection of their action. Its locomotive apparatus is, as you are