Meanwhile an inevitable and legitimate hypothesis is on trial,—­an hypothesis thus far not untenable,—­a trial just now very useful to science, and, we conclude, not harmful to religion, unless injudicious assailants temporarily make it so.

One good effect is already manifest:  its enabling the advocates of the hypothesis of a multiplicity of human species to perceive the double insecurity of their ground.  When the races of men are admitted to be of one species, the corollary, that they are of one origin, may be expected to follow.  Those who allow them to be of one species must admit an actual diversification into strongly marked and persistent varieties, and so admit the basis of fact upon which the Darwinian hypothesis is built; while those, on the other hand, who recognize a diversity of human species, will hardly be able to maintain that such species were primordial and supernatural in the common sense of the word.

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. 259) and third (p. 271) dilutions, no doubt, on Hahnemann’s famous principle, with an increase of potency at each dilution.  Probably the supposed transmutation is per saltus.  “Homoeopathic doses of transmutation,” indeed!  Well, if we really must swallow transmutation in some form or other, as this reviewer intimates, we might prefer the mild homoeopathic doses of Darwin’s formula to the allopathic bolus which the Edinburgh general practitioner appears to be compounding.]

[Footnote 2:  Vide North American Review, for April, 1860, p. 475, and Christian Examiner, for May, p. 457.]