It is well also to keep on record the striking dictum of Lord Kelvin, addressed to the students of University College.[[3]] "Science," he told them, "positively affirmed creative power."
It will be remembered that we quoted Mill as speaking of "permanent causes." We may be grateful to him for the suggestion. We could not readily think of a better term than the great "Permanent Cause" by which to describe, in modern language, the "I AM" of the Biblical Theology.[[4]]
But, if on this point there was no serious conflict of opinion, it was otherwise in regard to the next. Here it did look as if the new discoveries might have changed the whole situation. Huxley acknowledged that what struck him most forcibly on his first perusal of the Origin of Species, was that "teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death-blow at Mr. Darwin's hands."[[5]] But Huxley was a born fighter, and he could turn his weapons with facility and effect against his friends when he thought they had overstated their case. It is interesting to find him, in 1867, criticising Haeckel for his repudiation of the principle of Design.
"The Doctrine of Evolution," he says, "is the most formidable opponent of the commoner and coarser forms of teleology."
"The teleology which supposes that the eye such as we see it in man, or one of the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution." Then, referring to the appeal which had been made to the existence of rudimentary organs as discrediting teleology, he says in his characteristic way: "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 an argument against teleology."[[6]]
Darwin himself felt the grave difficulty in which the ordinary arguments had become involved; but he was most unwilling to abandon his belief in Design.
"The old argument from design in nature as given by Paley," he wrote, "which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man." On the other hand, he could not shut his eyes to the fact that there are "endless beautiful adaptations which we everywhere meet with,"[[7]] and to the further fact that "the mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed."[[8]]
A few years later, when Dr. Asa Gray had sent him from America a review in which he had written of "Mr. Darwin's great service to natural science in bringing back teleology," on the ground that in Darwinism usefulness and purpose come to the front again as working principles of the first order, Darwin replied, "What you say about teleology pleases me especially."[[9]] Later still, in 1878, Romanes sent him a copy of his Candid Examination. Darwin in his letter of acknowledgment wrote more than half seriously, in the person as it were of an imaginary correspondent, to this effect:
"I should like to hear what you would say if a theologian addressed you as follows:
"'I grant you the attraction of gravity, persistence of force (or conservation of energy), and one kind of matter, though the latter is an immense addition, but I maintain that God must have given such attributes to this force, independently of its persistence, that under certain conditions it develops or changes into light, heat, electricity, galvanism, perhaps into life.