Wherefore, if it be found that the new hypothesis has
grown upon our favor as we proceeded, this must be attributed not so
much to the force of the arguments of the book itself as to the want of
force of several of those by which it has been assailed. Darwins
arguments we might resist or adjourn; but some of the refutations of it
give us more concern than the book itself did.
These remarks apply mainly to the philosophical and theological
objections which have been elaborately urged, almost exclusively by the
American reviewers. The North British reviewer, indeed, roundly
denounces the book as atheistical, but evidently deems the case too
clear for argument. The Edinburgh reviewer, on the contrary, scouts all
such objections--as well he may, since he records his belief in "a
continuous creative operation," a constantly operating secondary
creational law," through which species are successively produced; and
he emits faint, but not indistinct, glimmerings of a transmutation
theory of his own;[III-8] so that he is equally exposed to all the
philosophical objections advanced by Agassiz, and to most of those
urged by the other American critics, against Darwin himself.
Proposing now to criticise the critics, so far as to see what their
most general and comprehensive objections amount to, we must needs
begin with the American reviewers, and with their arguments adduced to
prove that a derivative hypothesis ought not to be true, or is not
possible, philosophical, or theistic.
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