ld ones to be all destroyed. In living
bodies, variations will cause the slight alterations, generation will
multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out
with unerring skill each improvement."[15] (p. 226) "Let this process,"
he says, "go on for millions of years," and we shall at last have a
perfect eye.

It would be absurd to say anything disrespectful of such a man as Mr.
Darwin, and scarcely less absurd to indulge in any mere extravagance of
language; yet we are expressing our own experience, when we say that we
regard Mr. Darwin's books the best refutation of Mr. Darwin's theory. He
constantly shuts us up to the alternative of believing that the eye is a
work of design or the product of the unintended action of blind physical
causes. To any ordinarily constituted mind, it is absolutely impossible
to believe that it is not a work of design. Darwin himself, it is
evident, dear as his theory is, can hardly believe it. "It is
indispensable," he says, "to arrive at a just conclusion as to the
formation of the eye, that the reason should conquer the imagination;
but I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any
degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to
so startling an extent." (p. 225)

It will be observed that every step in his account of the formation of
the eye is an arbitrary assumption. We must first assume a thick layer
of tissue; then that the tissue is transparent; then that it has
cavities filled with fluid; that beneath the tissue is a nerve sensitive
to light; then that the fluid is constantly varying in density and
thickness; that its surfaces are constantly changing their contour; that
its different portions are ever shifting their relative distances; that
every favorable change is seized upon and rendered permanent,--thus
after millions of years we may get an eye as perfect as that of an
eagle. In like manner we may suppose a man to sit down to account for
the origin and contents of the Bible, assuming as his "working
hypothesis," that it is not the product of mind either human or divine,
but that it was made by a type-setting machine worked by steam, and
picking out type hap-hazard. In this way in a thousand years one
sentence might be produced, in another thousand a second, and in ten
thousand more, the two might get together in the right position. Thus in
the course of "millions of years" the Bible might have been produced,
with a