reactions from the Darwinism of the schools which we have just
referred to, and to which the second half of this chapter is devoted, are,
of course, of a purely scientific kind. And while we are devoting our
attention to them, we must not be unfaithful to the canon laid down in the
previous chapter, namely that with reference to the question of teleology
in the religious sense no real answer can be looked for from scientific
study, not even if it be anti-Darwinian. In this case, too, it is
impossible to read the convictions and intuitions of the religious
conception of the world out of a scientific study of nature: they precede
it. But here, too, we may find some accessory support and indirect
corroboration more or less strong and secure. This may be illustrated by a
single example. It will be shown that, on closer study, it is not
impossible to subordinate even the apparently confused tangle of
naturalistic factors of evolution which are summed up in the phrase
"struggle for existence" to interpretation from the religious point of
view. But matters will be in quite a different position if the whole
theory collapses, and instead of evolution and its paths being given over
to confusion and chance, it appears that from the very beginning and at
every point there is a predetermination of fixed and inevitable lines
along and up which it must advance. In many other connections
considerations of a like nature will reveal themselves to us in the course
of our study.

Darwinism, as popularly understood, is the theory that "men are descended
from monkeys," and in general that the higher forms of life are descended
from the lower, and it is regarded as Darwin's epoch-making work and his
chief merit--or fault according to the point of view--that he established
the Theory of Descent. This is only half correct, and it leaves out the
real point of Darwinism altogether. The Theory of Descent had its way
prepared by the evolutionist ideas and the speculative nature-philosophy
of Goethe, Schelling, Hegel and Oken; by the suggestions and glimmerings
of the nature-mysticism of the romanticists; by the results of comparative
anatomy and physiology; was already hinted at, at least as far as
derivation of species was concerned, in the works of Linne himself; was
worked out in the "zoological philosophies," by the elder Darwin, by
Lamarck, Etienne Geoffrey St. Hilaire and Buffon; was in the field long
before Charles Darwin's time; was already