Asa Gray

“ I can under such circumstances see no reason to doubt that the swiftest and slimmest wolves would have the best chance of surviving, and so be preserved or selected—provided always that they retained strength to master their prey at this or at some other period of the year, when they might be compelled to prey on other animals. I can see no more reason to doubt this than that man can improve the fleetness of his greyhounds by careful and methodical selection, or by that unconscious selection which results from each man trying to keep the best dogs without any thought of modifying the breed. ”

“ Let me now trace these principles as sources of action in Darwin's work or theory. Let us see how much there is of design acting to produce a foreseen end, and thus proving a reasoning and self-conscious Creator; and how much of mere blind power acting without rational design, or without a specific purpose or conscious foresight. Mr. Darwin has specified in a most clear and unmistakable manner the operation of his three great powers, or rather, the three great laws by which the organic power of life acts in the formation of an eye. ”

“ May not those naturalists who, knowing far less of the laws of inheritance than does the breeder, and knowing no more than he does of the intermediate links in the long lines of descent, yet admit that many of our domestic races have descended from the same parents—may they not learn a lesson of caution, when they deride the idea of species in a state of nature being lineal descendants of other species? ”

“ Taking Nature as exhibiting thought for my guide, it appears to me that while human thought is consecutive, Divine thought is simultaneous, embracing at the same time and forever, in the past, the present and the future, the most diversified relations among hundreds of thousands of organized beings, each of which may present complications again, which to study and understand even imperfectly—as for instance man himself— mankind has already spent thousands of years. ”

“ In following these indications, watching opportunities, and breeding only from those individuals which vary most in a desirable direction, man leads the course of variation as he leads a streamlet—apparently at will, but never against the force of gravitation—to a long distance from its source, and makes it more subservient to his use or fancy. He unconsciously strengthens those variations which he prizes when he plants the seed of a favorite fruit, preserves a favorite domestic animal, drowns the uglier kittens of a litter, and allows only the handsomest or the best mousers to propagate. ”

“ If he cannot recognize design in Nature because of evolution, he may be ranked with those of whom it was said, "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe." How strange that a convinced theist should be so prone to associate design only with miracle!
All turns, however, upon what is meant by this Nature, to which it appears more and more probable that the being and becoming—no less than the well-being and succession—of species and genera, as well as of individuals, are committed. ”

“ We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of clothes. A new theory, like a new pair of breeches (the Atlantic still affects the older type of nether garment) , is sure to have hard-fitting places; or, even when no particular fault can be found with the article, it oppresses with a sense of general discomfort. New notions and new styles worry us, till we get well used to them, which is only by slow degrees. ”

“ A purpose, an intention, a design, is evident in everything; and when our comprehension is so far enlarged as to contemplate the first rise of this visible system, we must adopt, with the strongest conviction, the idea of some intelligent cause or author. The uniform maxims, too, which prevail throughout the whole frame of the universe, naturally, if not necessarily, lead us to conceive this intelligence as single and undivided, where the prejudices of education oppose not so reasonable a theory. ”

“ And, truly, if his reasonings are legitimate, and his conclusions just, "Science has laid the axe to the tree."
"Given a set of marks which we look upon in human productions as unfailing indications of design," he asks, "is not the inference equally legitimate when we recognize these marks in Nature? To gaze on such a universe as this, to feel our hearts exult within us in the fullness of existence, and to offer in explanation of such beneficent provision no other word but Chance, seems as unthankful and iniquitous as it seems absurd. Chance produces nothing in the human sphere ”

“ For, of those who agree with us in thinking that Darwin has not established his theory of derivation many will admit with us that he has rendered a theory of derivation much less improbable than before; that such a theory chimes in with the established doctrines of physical science, and is not unlikely to be largely accepted long before it can be proved. Moreover, the various notions that prevail—equally among the most and the least religious—as to the relations between natural agencies or phenomena and efficient cause, are seemingly more crude, obscure, and discordant, than they need be. ”

“ When a naturalist comes to regard as three closely related species what he before took to be so many varieties of one species how has he thereby strengthened our conviction that the three forms are designed to have the differences which they actually exhibit? Wherefore so long as gradatory, orderly, and adapted forms in Nature argue design, and at least while the physical cause of variation is utterly unknown and mysterious, we should advise Mr. Darwin to assume in the philosophy of his hypothesis that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines. ”

“ What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails, and other animals, with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees, or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees! ”

“ It is a truly wonderful fact—the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity—that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold—namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes. ”

“ Happily it occurred to De Candolle that an interest might be imparted to an onerous undertaking, and a work of necessity be turned to good account for science, by studying the oaks in view of the question of species. What this term species means, or should mean, in natural history, what the limits of species, inter se or chronologically, or in geographical distribution, their modifications, actual or probable, their origin, and their destiny—these are questions which surge up from time to time; and now and then in the progress of science they come to assume a new and hopeful interest. ”

“ There he finds that an eye is no more than a vital aggregation or growth, directed, not by design nor chance, but moulded by natural variation and natural selection, through which it must, necessarily, have been developed and formed. Particles or atoms being aggregated by the blind powers of life, must become under the given conditions, by natural variation and natural selection, eyes, without design, as certainly as the red billiard-ball went to the west pocket, by the powers of inertia and elasticity, without the design of the hand that put it in motion. ”

“ We here claim only that some beings other than men design, and that the adaptations of means to ends in the structure of animals and plants, in so far as they carry the marks of purpose, carry also the implication of having been designed. Also, that the idea or hypothesis of a designing mind, as the author of Nature—however we came by it—having possession of the field, and being one which man, himself a designer, seemingly must needs form, cannot be rivaled except by some other equally adequate for explanation, or displaced except by showing the illegitimacy of the inference. ”

“ As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramification. ”

“ Difficult as it may be to conceive and impossible to demonstrate design in a whole of which the series of parts appear to be contingent, the alternative may be yet more difficult and less satisfactory. If all Nature is of a piece—as modern physical philosophy insists— then it seems clear that design must in some way, and in some sense, pervade the system, or be wholly absent from it. Of the alternatives, the predication of design—special, general, or universal, as the case may be—is most natural to the mind ”

“ Our conception of beauty being given, it is utterly improbable that chance should select, out of the infinity of combinations which form and color may afford, the precise combination which that conception will approve. But the universe is not posterior to our sense of beauty, but antecedent to it: our sense of beauty grows out of what we see; and hence the conformance of our world to our aesthetical conceptions is evidence, not of the world's origin, but of our own. ”

“ In all candor we must at least concede that such considerations suggest a genetic descent from the drift period down to the present, and allow time enough—if time is of any account— for variation and natural selection to work out some appreciable results in the way of divergence into races, or even into so-called species. Whatever might have been thought, when geological time was supposed to be separated from the present era by a clear line, it is now certain that a gradual replacement of old forms by new ones is strongly suggestive of some mode of origination which may still be operative. ”

“ No doubt we may still insist that, "in the present state of our knowledge, the adaptations in Nature afford a large balance of probability in favor of creation by intelligence," as Mill concluded; and probability must needs be the guide of reason through these dark places. Still, the balancing of irreconcilable facts is not a satisfying occupation, nor a wholly hopeful one, while fresh weights are from time to time dropping into the lighter side of the balance. Strong as our convictions are, they may be overborne by evidence. ”

“ But Darwin brings up another power, namely, natural selection, in place of this impossible chance. This not only may, but, according to Darwin, must of necessity produce an eye. It may indeed coexist with design, but it must exist and act and produce its results, even without design. Will such a mind, under such circumstances, infer the existence of the designer—God—when he can, at the same time, satisfactorily account for the thing produced, by the operation of this natural selection? ”

“ Now, the evidence of geology to-day is, that species seem to come in suddenly and in full perfection, remain substantially unchanged during the term of their existence, and pass away in full perfection. Other species take their place apparently by substitution, not by transmutation. But you will ask me, 'Do you, then, reject the doctrine of evolution? Do you accept the creation of species directly and without secondary agencies and processes?' I answer, No! Science knows nothing of phenomena which do not take place by secondary causes and processes. ”

“ Geology makes huge demands upon time; and we regret to find that it has exhausted ours—that what we meant for the briefest and most general sketch of some geological considerations in favor of Darwin's hypothesis has so extended as to leave no room for considering "the great facts of comparative anatomy and zoology" with which Darwin's theory "very well accords," nor for indicating how "it admirably serves for explaining the unity of composition of all organisms, the existence of representative and rudimentary organs, and the natural series which genera and species compose." ”

“ The latter will admit, with Owen and every morphologist, that hopeless is the attempt to explain the similarity of pattern in members of the same class by utility or the doctrine of final causes. "On the ordinary view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is, that it has so pleased the Creator to construct each animal and plant." Mr. Darwin, in proposing a theory which suggests a how that harmonizes these facts into a system, we trust implies that all was done wisely, in the largest sense designedly, and by an intelligent first cause. ”

“ Darwin announced the principle that cross-fertilization between the individuals of a species is the plan of Nature, and is practically so universal that it fairly sustains his inference that no hermaphrodite species continually self-fertilized would continue to exist, he made it clear to all who apprehend and receive the principle that a series of plants propagated by buds only must have weaker hold of life than a series reproduced by seed. ”

“ Why offspring should be like parent is more than any one can explain; but so it is, in a manner so nearly fixed and settled that we can count on it; yet not from any absolute necessity that we know of, and, indeed, with sufficiently striking difference now and then to demonstrate that it might have been otherwise, or is so in a notable degree. This transference of one eye through the head, from the side where it would be nearly useless to that in which it may help the other, bears all the marks of purpose, and so carries the implication of design. ”

“ Progress having once begun by the establishment of species, the laws of atavism and variability will suffice to tell the remainder of the story. The colonies gifted with the faculty of forming others in their likeness will soon by their increase become sole masters of the field; but the common enemy being thus destroyed, the struggle for life will be renewed among the conquerors. The saying that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand,' receives in Nature its flattest contradiction. Civil war is here the very instrument of progress; it brings about the survival of the fittest. ”

“ The harmony of Nature and its admirable perfection need not be regarded as inflexible and changeless. Nor need Nature be likened to a statue, or a cast in rigid bronze, but rather to an organism, with play and adaptability of parts, and life and even soul informing the whole. ”