Parallel paths Author:Thomas William Rolleston Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: might be introduced to the island, as the English sparrow has been introduced in Australia. Then, if the extermination of the butterflies did not proceed too rap... more »idly, we might expect, in the course of generations, to see protective adaptations assumed. But could we expect to see them assumed in anticipation of the advent of the destroyers ? We could not. Naturalists, however much they may differ, as they do differ, upon the question as to how protective adaptations actually take place, would all agree that they could not possibly take place in anticipation of needs not yet present. If they did, we should have a miracle, and where miracle comes in knowledge goes out. The cases where conscious, intelligent contrivance would be unmistakably recognizable are just the cases which never occur. The signal service rendered by the champions of the evolution theory, Quos nec fama Dcum, nec fulmina, nec minitanti Murmure compressit Coelum, is that they conquered the realm of organic nature for true knowledge, and gave the drama of its development a new and profound interest, by showing with an uncompromising courage only equalled by the extraordinarily minute and patient research which justified it, that the apparent instances of divine contrivance with which nature teems must be explained by the responsiveness, the adaptability, of living protoplasm. Needless to say, this demonstrationdoes not in the least disprove the existence of God as a supreme, conscious, personal Intelligence.1 But it does forbid us to deduce the existence of such a Being from the observation of natural phenomena. A living, developing universe has been set in the place of a Divine Mechanician operating on dead matter. The question, what conception we are to form of the forces of evolution, will be more fully...« less