In the doctrine of the origination of species through natural selection, these adaptations appear as the outcome rather than as the motive, as final results rather than final causes.  Adaptation to use, although the very essence of Darwinism, is not a fixed and inflexible adaptation, realized once for all at the outset; it includes a long progression and succession of modifications, adjusting themselves to changing circumstances, under which they may be more and more diversified, specialized, and in a just sense perfected.  Now, the question is, Does this involve the destruction or only the reconstruction of our consecrated ideas of teleology?  Is it compatible with our seemingly inbore conception of Nature as an ordered system?  Furthermore, and above all, can the Darwinian theory itself dispense with the idea of purpose, in the ordinary sense of the word, as tantamount to design?

From two opposing sides we hear the first two questions answered in the negative.  And an affirmative response to the third is directly implied in the following citation: 

“The word purpose has been used in a sense to which it is, perhaps, worth while to call attention.  Adaptation of means to an end may be provided in two ways that we at present know of:  by processes of natural selection, and by the agency of an intelligence in which an image or idea of the end preceded the use of the means.  In both cases the existence of the adaptation is accounted for by the necessity or utility of the end.  It seems to me convenient to use the word purpose as meaning generally the end to which certain means are adapted, both in these two cases and in any other that may hereafter become known, provided only that the adaptation is accounted for by the necessity or utility of the end.  And there seems no objection to the use of the phrase ‘final cause’ in this wider sense, if it is to be kept at all.  The word ‘design’ might then be kept for the special case of adaptation by an intelligence.  And we may then say that, since the process of natural selection has been understood, purpose has ceased to suggest design to instructed people, except in cases where the agency of man is independently probable.”—­P.C.W., in the Contemporary Review for September, 1875, p. 657.

The distinction made by this anonymous writer is convenient and useful, and his statement clear.  We propose to adopt this use of the terms purpose and design, and to examine the allegation.  The latter comes to this:  “Processes of natural selection” exclude “the agency of an intelligence in which the image or idea of the end precedes the use of the means;” and since the former have been understood “purpose has ceased to suggest design to instructed people, except in cases where the agency of man is independently probable.”  The maxim “L’homme propose, Dieu dispose,” under this reading means that the former has the monopoly of design, while the latter accomplishes without designing.  Man’s works alone suggest design.