Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/225

Rh Haeckel's denial of teleology is thus shown to prove too much. And the appeal to rudimentary organs against teleology, Huxley points out, places the evolutionist of that day in a dilemma:

For either these rudiments are of no use to the animals, in which case. . . they ought to have disappeared; or they are of some use to the animal, in which case they are of no use as arguments against teleology.

We can hardly he wrong in assuming that Dr. Asa Gray had this review of Huxley's in his mind when he spoke of—

The great gain to science from Mr. Darwin's having brought back teleology to natural history. In Darwinism [he adds] usefulness and purpose come to the front again as working principles of the first order; upon them, indeed, the whole system rests,

Is there, then, no difference between the old and the new teleology? Is the old argument rehabilitated? Can we say here, as in the triumph of derivation over special creation, that the Christian faith loses nothing and gains much? We are by no means prepared to defend this paradox. The old and rapid argument from Nature to an omnipotent and beneficent Author was never logically valid. To a thinking man its death-knell was sounded by Kant long before the death-blow was given by Darwin. In spite of the reverence with which Kant treats an argument, which he speaks of as "the oldest, the clearest, and most in conformity with human reason," he sees that the very most which could be established by it would be the existence of "an Architect of the world, not a Creator." It must fall very far short of its proposed aim—viz., to prove the existence of an all sufficient original Being. Modern science has only brought out in its own way and for ordinary people a truth which metaphysicians already knew—viz., that the argument was, as Dr. Gray puts it, "weighted with much more than it can carry. . . . The burden which our fathers carried comfortably, with some adventitious help, has become too heavy for our shoulders." The older teleologists noted certain favorable instances, and based on them an argumentative structure which the foundation was quite insufficient to sustain; while, if instances of apparent meaninglessness or misery were adduced, they were put on one side with Dieu le veult In the present day a Christian, whether he is an evolutionist or not, has to rim the gantlet with an army of facts and arguments of which his forefathers knew nothing. No intelligent man could now write as Paley does:

It is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the water teem with delighted existence. In a spring noon, or a summer evening, on whichever side I