Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/845

Rh contribute so materially to our comfort and enjoyment—can never, by any sane man, be regarded as the result of mere fortuity, or of the blind and indeterminate action of force on matter. No, the whole grand march of development from the Archasan to the Quaternary period, from the simplest forms of life to the most complex, from monad to man, all speak in the most eloquent and unequivocal language of mind and providence, of a Being who foresees, designs, directs, governs; who in the language of Holy Writ "reacheth from end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly"; "Who hath ordained all things in measure, and number and weight."

But teleologists, while maintaining that design and purpose are everywhere manifest in Nature, and while proclaiming that everything is under the government of law, are not guilty of the error into which materialistic scientists so often lapse—that is, of regarding law as a cause, or a power, or as a kind of demiurge independent of the Deity. Far from it. Law in itself is nothing, does nothing, explains nothing. Law is not a force, is not an agent, is not and can not be the efficient or operative cause of anything whatever. Law is only the method according to which force acts; it is but the expression of the mode of divine action. Science has been able to discover a few of the laws of Nature, as it has been able to disclose evidences of design and purpose in the divers realms of creation. And as from the few known laws of Nature men of science are justified in asserting that the entire universe and all it contains are governed by law, so also is the teleologist, from the knowledge he already possesses, equally warranted in declaring that not only the world as a whole, but also everything in it, attests the presence and action of Mind and exhibits such obvious traces of purposiveness that it may truthfully be affirmed that the doctrine of final causes reposes on as firm a basis as does the teaching, universally accepted, that the whole of Nature, animate and inanimate, is under the control of divinely imposed law.

No, it is not true that teleology has been banished from science and theology by recent research, or by the confirmation which is daily being given to the theory of evolution. Teleology has been modified, not destroyed. It has been expanded and ennobled and rendered more subtle and comprehensive than ever before. We now no longer look upon the Creator as directly producing the myriad species of plants and animals which variegate and beautify this earth of ours, but we regard him as operating through secondary agents—creatures of his hand, ministers of his wisdom and power. He is not the immediate cause of the infinitude of forms which characterize the organic and inorganic worlds, but rather the Causa Causarum. He is not, as St. Athanasius observes, a