9HMKJM - The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

160
DARWINIANA.
far back. Yet one interposition admits the principle
as well as more. Interposition presupposes particular
necessity or reason for it, and raises the question, when
and how often it may have been necessary. It might
be the natural supposition, if we had only one set of
species to account for, or if the successive inhabitants
of the earth had no other connections or resemblances
than those which adaptation to similar conditions,
which final causes in the narrower sense, might ex-
plain. But if this explanation of organic Nature re-
quires one to "believe that, at innumerable periods
in the earth's history, certain elemental atoms have
been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues,"
and this when the results are seen to be strictly con-
nected and systematic, we cannot wonder that such
interventions should at length be considered, not as
interpositions or interferences, but rather— to use the
reviewer's own language — as "exertions so frequent
and beneficent that we come to regard them as the or-
dinary action of Him who laid the foundation of the
earth, and without whom not a sparrow falleth to the
ground." '
"What does the difference between Mr. Darwin and
his reviewer now amount to ? If we say that accord-
ing to one view the origination of species is natural,
according to the other miraculous, Mr. Darwin agrees
that "what is natural as much requires and presupposes
an intelligent mind to render it so— that is, to
effect it continually or at stated times—as what is su-
pernatural does to effect it for once." 2 He merely
work.
1 North American Review for April, 1860, p. 506.
9 Vide motto from Butler, prefixed to the second edition of Darwin'a