Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity [pp. 250-294]

Development Hypothesis.
ginating organic structure, endowed with organic life: while
the third, commonly known as the development hypothesis,
taking this ultimate organic structure for its starting point,
makes its varied organic forms the result of a vegetative
instinct, or unconscious want, prompting a conatus in certain
directions, just as the tendrils of a plant in a window all grow
towards the light; and this again resulting in new wants, as
the development goes on, gives rise to new struggles of the
dynamic or vital force, until the whole complex organism is
perfectly developed.
We entreat our readers' patience while we describe these
hypotheses of science; for however they may strike across their
common sense, as solutions of the profound mysteries of living
nature, we assure them, first, that they are held by men of
great vigour and penetration of intellect, great compass of
knowledge, and, so far as appears, of the utmost scientific fairness and candour: and secondly, that they are calm and careful records of what microscopic and chemical analysis seems to
reveal, as the true history of the ultimate phenomena and laws
of the physical and the organic world. And then, if they will
further remember, that phenomena and laws are all that the
inductive processes of physical science are held to apply to, it
may mitigate their wonder, that so many, especially of our
enthusiastic young scholars of science, should stop short with a
physical solution of physical facts; and discarding the whole
doctrines of efficient and final causes from the domain of science,
to that of religious (i. e. in their view of unsupported or superstitious) faith, should easily dispense with a personal, intelligent
and beneficent First Cause.
In admitting the truth of the ultimate facts of physiology on
which the Development Hypothesis rests its argument, we are
far from conceding that the zoological deductions from them
are valid, in whole or in part. The moment the hypothesis
leaves the ultimate phenomenon of organic life, mysteriously
originating in a nucleated albuminous cell, endowed by its
vital forces with the power of assimilation and reproduction, to
construct on that fact a solution of the vast and complex
problem of the organic world, it becomes a tissue of assumptions and unproved generalizations; many of which, that are
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