... Our acceptance, therefore, of the
Darwinian hypothesis must be provisional so long as one link in the
chain of evidence is wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants
certainly produced by selective breeding from a common stock are
fertile, and their progeny are fertile one with another, that link will
be wanting. For so long selective breeding will not be proved to be
competent to all that is required if it produce natural species."[22] In
immediate connection with the above passage, there is another which
throws a clear light on Professor Huxley's cosmical views. "The whole
analogy of natural operations furnish so complete and crushing an
argument against the intervention of any but what are called secondary
causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in
view of the intimate relations of man and the rest of the living world,
and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can
see no reason for doubting that all are cooerdinate terms of nature's
great progression, from formless to formed, from the inorganic to the
organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will."[23]
Ought not this to settle the matter? Are we to give up the Bible and all
our hopes for the sake of an hypothesis that all living things,
including man, on the face of the earth, are descended from a primordial
animalcule, by natural selection, when such a man as Huxley, who (as
Voltaire said of the prophet Habbakuk) is _capable de tout_, says that
it has not been proved that any one species has thus originated?
But on the other hand, while he honestly admits that Darwin's doctrine
is a mere hypothesis and not a theory, he has nevertheless written at
least three essays or reviews in its exposition and vindication.
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