These remarks apply mainly to the philosophical and theological objections which have been elaborately urged, almost exclusively by the American reviewers.  The North British reviewer, indeed, roundly denounces the book as atheistical, but evidently deems the case too clear for argument.  The Edinburgh reviewer, on the contrary, scouts all such objections—­as well he may, since he records his belief in “a continuous creative operation,” a constantly operating secondary creational law,” through which species are successively produced; and he emits faint, but not indistinct, glimmerings of a transmutation theory of his own;[III-8] so that he is equally exposed to all the philosophical objections advanced by Agassiz, and to most of those urged by the other American critics, against Darwin himself.

Proposing now to criticise the critics, so far as to see what their most general and comprehensive objections amount to, we must needs begin with the American reviewers, and with their arguments adduced to prove that a derivative hypothesis ought not to be true, or is not possible, philosophical, or theistic.

It must not be forgotten that on former occasions very confident judgments have been pronounced by very competent persons, which have not been finally ratified.  Of the two great minds of the seventeenth century, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly religious as well as philosophical, one produced the theory of gravitation, the other objected to that theory that it was subversive of natural religion.  The nebular hypothesis—­a natural consequence of the theory of gravitation and of the subsequent progress of physical and astronomical discovery—­has been denounced as atheistical even down to our own day.  But it is now largely adopted by the most theistical natural philosophers as a tenable and perhaps sufficient hypothesis, and where not accepted is no longer objected to, so far as we know, on philosophical or religious grounds.

The gist of the philosophical objections urged by the two Boston reviewers against an hypothesis of the derivation of species—­or at least against Darwin’s particular hypothesis—­ is, that it is incompatible with the idea of any manifestation of design in the universe, that it denies final causes.  A serious objection this, and one that demands very serious attention.

The proposition, that things and events in Nature were not designed to be so, if logically carried out, is doubtless tantamount to atheism.  Yet most people believe that some were designed and others were not, although they fall into a hopeless maze whenever they undertake to define their position.  So we should not like to stigmatize as atheistically disposed a person who regards certain things and events as being what they are through designed laws (whatever that expression means), but as not themselves specially ordained, or who, in another connection, believes in general, but not in particular Providence.  We could sadly puzzle him with questions; but in return he might equally puzzle us.  Then, to deny that anything was specially designed to be what it is, is one proposition; while to deny that the Designer supernaturally or immediately made it so, is another:  though the reviewers appear not to recognize the distinction.