mpt, and that the vigorous,
the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." And these are the
words with which he concluded the _Origin of Species_: "Thus from the
war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we are
capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals,
directly follows."

But a year or two later he shewed that his mind was by no means at rest
on the matter, by writing in this strain to his friend Asa Gray:

"I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish
to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There
seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself
that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the
Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the
living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice....
I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws,
with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what
we may call chance. Not that this notion _at all_ satisfies me....
Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you
that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical."[2]

{57}

Happily there were others who were able to see their way somewhat
further than this. Romanes, in a paper which he read before the
Aristotelian Society in 1889, shewed that he was reconsidering his
position. He questioned whether the assertion, made by a speaker in a
previous discussion, that "the fair order of Nature is only acquired by
a wholesale waste and sacrifice," could be accepted as strictly true,
for "how can it be said that, in point of fact, there _has_ been a
waste, or _has_ been a sacrifice? Clearly such things can only be said
when our point of view is restricted to the means (_i.e._, the
wholesale destruction of the less fit); not when we extend our view to
what, even within the limits of human observation, is unquestionably
the _end_ (_i.e._, the causal result in an ever improving world of
types)."[3]

He had intended to write more fully on the subject, but did not live to
do so. We only know that on the Sunday before his death he did express
to Bishop Gore his entire agreement with a statement that had been made
a short time before by Professor Knight, in his _Aspects of Theism_, to
the effect that "A larger good is evolved through the winnowing process
by which physical nature casts its weak