it? Let us listen to the
author: "There exists an intelligent power, and that intelligent power
is natural selection, constantly on the watch for every alteration
accidentally produced in the transparent layers, in order carefully to
choose such of those alterations as may tend to produce a more distinct
image.... Natural selection will choose with infallible skill each new
improvement effected."[116] Natural selection is a law; a law is the
series of facts; it seems that we must seek for the power which directs
this series of facts; but, lo, the series of facts itself is transformed
into a power--into an intelligent power--into a power which chooses with
infallible skill! The confusion of ideas is complete. The mind is on a
wrong scent; it concludes that the law explains everything, and has
itself no need of explanation. The idea of the cause disappears, and, as
Auguste Comte expresses it, "science conducts God with honor to its
frontiers, thanking Him for His provisional services."[117] This is not
perhaps the idea of Mr. Darwin, but it is at any rate the idea of some
of his disciples, as we shall see by-and-by.

Thus the idea of the cause is kept out of sight. Let us now see the fate
to which are consigned those other requirements of the reason--the
eternal and the infinite. I take up Dr. Buechner's book, and I read: "We
are incapable of forming an idea, even approximately, of the _eternal_
and the _infinite_, because our mind, shut up within the limits of the
senses, in what regards space and time, is quite unable to pass these
bounds so as to rise to the height of these ideas." I follow the text,
and thirteen lines further on, in the same page, I read, "Therefore
matter and space must be eternal."[118] Observe well the use which this
writer makes of the great ideas of the reason. Is it desired to employ
them to prove the existence of God? He will have nothing to do with
them. Is the object in question to deny God's existence? He makes use of
them; and all in the same page. This is coarse work, no doubt, and Dr.
Buechner damages his cause; but, under forms, often more subtle and more
intelligent, the same sophism turns up in all systems of
materialism.[119] It is affirmed that we have no real idea of the
infinite, and it is sought at the same time to beguile the need which
reason feels of this idea by applying it to matter.

Pray do not suppose that I am here attacking the natural sciences, in
the interest of meta