Returning to the accidental element, it is evident that the strongest point against the compatibility of Darwin’s hypothesis with design in Nature is made when natural selection is referred to as picking out those variations which are improvements from a vast number which are not improvements, but perhaps the contrary, and therefore useless or purposeless, and born to perish.  But even here the difficulty is not peculiar; for Nature abounds with analogous instances.  Some of our race are useless, or worse, as regards the improvement of mankind; yet the race may be designed to improve, and may be actually improving.  Or, to avoid the complication with free agency—­the whole animate life of a country depends absolutely upon the vegetation, the vegetation upon the rain.  The moisture is furnished by the ocean, is raised by the sun’s heat from the ocean’s surface, and is wafted inland by the winds.  But what multitudes of raindrops fall back into the ocean—­are as much without a final cause as the incipient varieties which come to nothing!  Does it therefore follow that the rains which are bestowed upon the soil with such rule and average regularity were not designed to support vegetable and animal life?  Consider, likewise, the vast proportion of seeds and pollen, of ova and young—­a thousand or more to one—­which come to nothing, and are therefore purposeless in the same sense, and only in the same sense, as are Darwin’s unimproved and unused slight variations.  The world is full of such cases; and these must answer the argument—­for we cannot, except by thus showing that it proves too much.

Finally, it is worth noticing that, though natural selection is scientifically explicable, variation is not.  Thus far the cause of variation, or the reason why the offspring is sometimes unlike the parents, is just as mysterious as the reason why it is generally like the parents.  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, but 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 toward the omnipotence of matter, as some suppose, but to ward 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?