Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/48

38 to people who have not given it patient and prolonged study.

Our author appears to be in possession of some very definite information respecting the solar system, not set down in the ordinary treatises on astronomy. He knows that it was "arranged with reference to the law of universal gravitation," that "the existing arrangements must have been intentional," that "there is the strongest evidence that a certain means was chosen and intentionally put into operation." The Creator, however, he explains (page 183), "does not meet an external demand." He creates the demand or purpose himself and then satisfies it. What kind of "purpose" that can be that has no relation to any need the writer does not explain, though, of course, he knows. Strange to say, we read a little farther on (page 207) that the Creator is "governed by a purpose in ail that he does." Does this mean that the Creator ties his own hands by the purposes that he forms without any reference to external demands? Again, we are assured with tiresome iteration that the Creator does nothing that is "useless." Useless to whom? To himself? Or to an external world? If to himself, the remark seems senseless; if to an external world, then there is the meeting of an external demand.

But if, on the one hand, our author knows many remarkable things that are not known to the world at large, there are other things quite within the range of his reading of which he seems to have remained willingly ignorant. He wants to know (page 214) how it came to be imposed upon a whole group of beings, as a law of Nature, that whatever utility of structure was of paramount importance to the whole group should be preserved against the modifying influences that were destined (on the theory of evolution) to produce species differing absolutely from each other." The answer is, of course, that any deviation from a structure that was of paramount utility would consign the organism manifesting it to destruction; and that eventually the typical organization would by age-long inheritance become so stamped into the constitution of those sharing it that a deviation of any moment would become matter of simple impossibility.

Taking the work before us as a whole, we may say that, while it evinces a creditable amount of industry on the part of its author, and while, as a piece of special pleading against the hypothesis of evolution, it shows an ingenuity that, in another sphere, must possess considerable value, it betrays an altogether insufficient acquaintance with the data on which the hypothesis in question is founded, and is, moreover, vitiated by the constant use of an assumption which Kant has abundantly shown to be an altogether illegitimate starting-point for scientific inquiry. The most serious injustice it does to the doctrine of evolution is in representing it as an irreligious system of thought. No scientific doctrine can by any possibility be irreligious, for the most that science can do is to indicate the limits of the known and