rries with it a far greater authority, that of
Mr. Charles Darwin. He writes:--

"It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We
know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued
efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the
eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this
inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to declare that the Creator
works by intellectual powers like those of man?"[7]

Here purposiveness is not indeed denied point-blank, but the intention
of the author is unmistakable, it is to refer the wonderful result to
the gradual accumulation of small accidental improvements which were not
due as a rule, if at all, to anything "analogous" to design.

"Variation," he says, "will cause the slight alterations;" that is to
say, the slight successive variations whose accumulation results in such
a marvellous structure as the eye, are caused by--variation; or in other
words, they are indefinite, due to nothing that we can lay our hands
upon, and therefore certainly not due to design. "Generation," continues
Mr. Darwin, "will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection
will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go
on for millions of years, and during each year on millions of
individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical
instrument might be thus formed as superior to one of glass, as the
works of the Creator are to those of man?"[8]

The reader will observe that the only skill--and this involves
design--supposed by Mr. Darwin to be exercised in the foregoing process,
is the "unerring skill" of natural selection. Natural selection,
however, is, as he himself tells us, a synonym for the survival of the
fittest, which last he declares to be the "more accurate" expression,
and to be "sometimes" equally convenient.[9] It is clear then that he
only speaks metaphorically when he here assigns "unerring skill" to the
fact that the fittest individuals commonly live longest and transmit
most offspring, and that he sees no evidence of design in the numerous
slight successive "alterations"--or variations--which are "caused by
variation."

It were easy to multiply quotations which should prove that the denial
of "purposiveness" is commonly conceived to be the inevitable
accompaniment of a belief in evolution. I will, however, content myself
with but one more--from Isido