Teleology.

If what I have been saying is of real value, it will appear that the two great discoveries of modern science, the conservation of force and the law of evolution, must eventually give to it a vast impulse in the direction of religious inquiry. The one establishes the unity of the universe in respect to Force; the other establishes the unity of the universe in respect to Law. One Force rules throughout Space; one Law rules throughout Time; and the Force and the Law are themselves explicable as one only as Mind. To this conclusion I believe that modern science is cautiously but surely approaching.

But I shall be met at once with the rebuff that these two discoveries, and especially the evolutional theory as applied to biology, have forever disposed of the old argument from design. Prof. Huxley, in his "Lay Sermons" [pp. 301—3041 argues that "teleology, as commonly understood, had received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin's hands." I admit it; for the argument from design is usually limited to the special adaptations of organ to function, for which a non-teleological cause is found in the law of Natural Selection. But the adaptation of the universal environment to the evolution of universal organic life admits of no such explanation. No cause has ever been assigned why the net result of all events taken as a whole should be what it is,—why all Influences should so wonderfully conspire to develop a cosmos out of chaos and a magnificent fauna and flora out of protoplasmic sameness,—why the system of Nature should work thus undeviatingly in one continuous direction. If it is said that this must have been, and could not have been otherwise, I reply that this must is the very thing to be explained. Nature might have been forever, for aught we know, a huge seething cauldron of warring elements, tending to no peace and productive of no result. Why must it have been what it is rather than that? Scientific men cheat themselves if they swallow that must as an antidote to the discomfort of puzzling queries. The queries[unclear: And] page 20 not mousing about in petty details nor aiming to prove God piece-meal, but sweeping over the whole field of thought, which finds an answer to those queries in the idea of Infinite Mind. In a later paper quoted by St. George Mivart [Genesis of Species, p. 273], Prof. Huxley himself says:—" It is necessary to remark that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the law of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution. . . . . The teleological and the mechanical views of Nature are not necessarily mutually exclusive; on the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequence; and the more completely is he at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe." The larger teleology, however, in which I believe, has nothing to do with "primordial arrangements of matter," and rests on dynamical rather than on mechanical conceptions. If the mechanist assumes "primordial arrangements," he occupies what the Germans call a "conquered stand-point." The teleology I would urge is the unity of plan which must result from, unity of force and unity of law, if these two are made one in mind; and this unity of plan I hold to be a far truer explanation of the evolution of an orderly universe out of chaotic nebula than the arbitrary must of the pure mechanist.