election) may have worn their actual channels as they flowed; yet
their particular courses may have been assigned; and where we see them
forming definite and useful lines of irrigation, after a manner
unaccountable on the laws of gravitation and dynamics, we should
believe that the distribution was designed.

To insist, therefore, that the new hypothesis of the derivative origin
of the actual species is incompatible with final causes and design is
to take a position which we must consider philosophically untenable.
We must also regard it as unwise or dangerous, in the present state
and present prospects of physical and physiological science. We should
expect the philosophical atheist or skeptic to take this ground; also,
until better informed, the unlearned and unphilosophical believer; but
we should think that the thoughtful theistic philosopher would take
the other side. Not to do so seems to concede that only supernatural
events can be shown to be designed, which no theist can admit,--seems
also to misconceive the scope and meaning of all ordinary arguments
for design in Nature. This misconception is shared both by the
reviewers and the reviewed. At least, Mr. Darwin uses expressions
which seem to imply that the natural forms which surround us, because
they have a history or natural sequence, could have been only
generally, but not particularly designed,--a view at once superficial
and contradictory; whereas his true line should be, that his
hypothesis concerns the order and not the cause, the _how_ and not the
_why_ of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design just
where it was before.

To illustrate this first from the theist's point of view. Transfer the
question for a moment from the origination of species to the
origination of individuals, which occurs, as we say, naturally.
Because natural, that is, "stated, fixed, or settled," is it any the
less designed on that account? We acknowledge that God is our
maker,--not merely the originator of the race, but _our_ maker as
individuals,--and none the less so because it pleased Him to make us
in the way of ordinary generation. If any of us were born unlike our
parents and grandparents, in a slight degree, or in whatever degree,
would the case be altered in this regard? The whole argument in
natural theology proceeds upon the ground that the inference for a
final cause of the structure of the hand and of the valves in the
veins is just as valid now, in indiv