The English mind is prone to positivism and kindred forms of
materialistic philosophy, and we must expect the derivative theory to
be taken up in that interest. We have no predilection for that school,
but the contrary. If we had, we might have looked complacently upon a
line of criticism which would indirectly, but effectively, play into
the hands of positivists and materialistic atheists generally. The
wiser and stronger ground to take is, that the derivative hypothesis
leaves the argument for design, and therefore for a Designer, as valid
as it ever was;--that to do any work by an instrument must require,
and therefore presuppose, the exertion rather of more than of less
power than to do it directly;--that whoever would be a consistent
theist should believe that Design in the natural world is coextensive
with Providence, and hold fully to the one as he does to the other, in
spite of the wholly similar and apparently insuperable difficulties
which the mind encounters whenever it endeavors to develop the idea
into a complete system, either in the material and organic, or in the
moral world. It is enough, in the way of obviating objections, to show
that the philosophical difficulties of the one are the same, and only
the same, as of the other.
[Footnote 1: Whatever it may be, it is not "the homoeopathic form of
the transmutative hypothesis," as Darwin's is said to be, (p. 252,
Amer. reprint,) so happily that the prescription is repeated in the
second (p.
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