“I was thinking,” said he,“how much they resemble the society of which Lady Wortley Montague once spoke, established for taking the word ‘not’ out of the commandments and putting it into the Creed. She rather approved of the idea, as she thought so many people loved to be disobedient, it might bring about a reformation in morals.”
“Oh, but we are not immoral,” said her brother; “it is a higher morality, a higher basis we wish to introduce. We want first to be rid of the idea of God; the mechanic Thor with the hammer and workman’s tools. The design argument is played out, don’t you think?”
“It is hard to have to believe, and still harder to maintain before one’s unlearned friends, that this complicated machinery, so compact, so admirably adapted to its purpose, had no designer,” said Elsworth, with a sigh he could not repress.
“Oh, but it had!” said the young physician. “You must claim all for development that the theist claims for God the mechanic; you must claim that every articulation, every tendon and muscle assumed its form after long ages of necessity for its appearance had gradually evolved it in its present perfection.”
“In a measure I grant this. I know how faculties come to us by reaching after them—know that the craftsman’s deftness is the result of long practice and education of sense and muscle; but I cannot find in the highest craftsman’s hand a single extra nerve or tendon, or a better articulation, than I find in the clumsiest day-labourer’s fist which never knew the use of a more delicate instrument than a spade.”
“Of course not,” said Devaux; “it is not the individual, it is the type which is developed into a higher grade by slow stages, and so gradually that it is usually impossible to mark the precise advent of a distinct advance. Still, as Haeckel points out in the case of the axolotl in the Jardin des Plantes, some few advanced beyond the grade of development hitherto known in them; they lost their gills, changed the shape of their bodies, and, from aquatic animals, became lung-breathers and terrestrial animals. What do you say to that?”
“I would like to know more precise particulars than Haeckel gives of the anatomical characteristics of the axolotl in its natural condition in Mexico; whether it may or may not be the fact that all axolotls, after having propagated themselves in their larval state, undergo the metamorphosis into salamander like animals (Amblystoma).”[[1]]
“But surely you cannot be blind to the enormous number of facts adduced by entomologists and botanists to show how the organs of insects and plants have a direct correlation to each other; how each organ and the whole form of the insect is the outcome of its effort to obtain food from particular species of plants, and the form of the plant the outcome of its resistance to giving food supply without payment in the shape of pollen dissemination. The ingenuity of the insect in its endeavour to get nectar easily, is met by the cleverness, so to speak, of the plant in providing the food only in such situations where it cannot be reached without efficient pollen dusting. Where is the room for your heavenly Mechanic here?”
“I fail to see that you in the least disturb my theism. ‘These are only parts of His ways.’ I expect that a Creator of all things would operate by means, by just such natural laws and the power of such environment as you have instanced, to modify and develop organs. All these things serve but to make me admire the power of His inflexible laws, and the infinite wisdom which set them going. I see nothing in these things to make disbelieve in an almighty Creator. The creating influence is only set a little farther back, not excluded. That these wonderful adaptations exist potentially in the original protoplasm of the creature, is to me quite as much a proof of an all-wise Creator as if I believed in a separate interference for the production of each organ, or adaptation as its necessity arose. It is the potentiality in the cell and the atom that transcends all men’s materialist explanations, that is so wonderful to me. This is where you see Force and Nature, and the Christian sees God, as Browning says:—
“‘We find great things are made of little things,