" (p. 265) Those laws are those with
which we are familiar: Heredity, Variations, Over Production, Struggle
for Life, Survival of the Fittest. "It is probable," he says, "that
these primary facts or laws are but results of the very nature of life,
and of the essential properties of organized and unorganized matter. Mr.
Herbert Spencer, in his 'First Principles' and in his 'Biology,' has, I
think, made us able to understand how this may be; but at present we
may accept these simple laws, without going further back, and the
question then is, Whether the variety, the harmony, the contrivance, and
the beauty we perceive, can have been produced by the action of these
laws alone, or whether we are required to believe in the incessant
interference and direct action of the mind and will of the Creator." (p.
267)[16] Mr. Wallace says, that the Duke of Argyll maintains that God
"has personally applied general laws to produce effects which those laws
are not in themselves capable of producing; that the universe alone with
all its laws intact, would be a sort of chaos, without variety, without
harmony, without design, without beauty; that there is not (and
therefore we may presume that there could not be) any self-developing
power in the universe. I believe, on the contrary, that the universe is
so constituted as to be self-regulating; that as long it contains life,
the forms under which that life is manifested have an inherent power of
adjustment to each other and to their surroundings; and that this
adjustment necessarily leads to the greatest amount of variety and
beauty and enjoyment, because it does depend on general laws, and not on
a continual supervision and rearrangement of details.
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