It is now as inexplicable as any other origination; and
if ever explained, the explanation will only carry up the sequence of
secondary causes one step farther, and bring us in face of a somewhat
different problem, which will have the same element of mystery that
the problem of variation has now. Circumstances may preserve or may
destroy the variations; man may use or direct them; but selection,
whether artificial or natural, no more originates them than man
originates the power which turns a wheel, when he dams a stream and
lets the water fall upon it. The origination of this power is a
question about efficient cause. The tendency of science in respect to
this obviously is not towards the omnipotence of matter, as some
suppose, but towards the omnipotence of spirit.
So the real question we come to is as to the way in which we are to
conceive intelligent and efficient cause to be exerted, and upon what
exerted. Are we bound to suppose efficient cause in all cases exerted
upon nothing to evoke something into existence,--and this thousands of
times repeated, when a slight change in the details would make all the
difference between successive species? Why may not the new species, or
some of them, be designed diversifications of the old?
There are, perhaps, only three views of efficient cause which may
claim to be both philosophical and theistic.
1. The view of its exertion at the beginning of time, endowing matter
and created things with forces which do the work and produce the
phenomena.
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