.
This conception they found repugnant alike to intelligence and
conscience, but, though they do not seem to have perceived it, they left
the door open for a design more true and more demonstrable than that
which they excluded. By making their variations mainly due to effort and
intelligence, they made organic development run on all-fours with human
progress, and with inventions which we have watched growing up from small
beginnings. They made the development of man from the amoeba part and
parcel of the story that may be read, though on an infinitely smaller
scale, in the development of our most powerful marine engines from the
common kettle, or of our finest microscopes from the dew-drop.

The development of the steam-engine and the microscope is due to
intelligence and design, which did indeed utilise chance suggestions, but
which improved on these, and directed each step of their accumulation,
though never foreseeing more than a step or two ahead, and often not so
much as this. The fact, as I have elsewhere urged, that the man who made
the first kettle did not foresee the engines of the _Great Eastern_, or
that he who first noted the magnifying power of the dew-drop had no
conception of our present microscopes--the very limited amount, in fact,
of design and intelligence that was called into play at any one
point--this does not make us deny that the steam-engine and microscope
owe their development to design. If each step of the road was designed,
the whole journey was designed, though the particular end was not
designed when the journey was begun. And so is it, according to the
older view of evolution, with the development of those living organs, or
machines, that are born with us, as part of the perambulating carpenter's
chest we call our bodies. The older view gives us our design, and gives
us our evolution too. If it refuses to see a quasi-anthropomorphic God
modelling each species from without as a potter models clay, it gives us
God as vivifying and indwelling in all His creatures--He in them, and
they in Him. If it refuses to see God outside the universe, it equally
refuses to see any part of the universe as outside God. If it makes the
universe the body of God, it also makes God the soul of the universe. The
question at issue, then, between the Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin and the
neo-Darwinism of his grandson, is not a personal one, nor anything like a
personal one. It not only involves the existen