The Essence of Darwinism and the Basis of Modern Orthodoxy 117
pose)—epitomizes the argument. McCosh holds that God's order and benevolence
may be inferred from two almost contradictory properties that reside in tension
within all natural objects—"the principle of order" and "the principle of special
adaptation." (These two principles persist in Darwin's formulation under the names
"Unity of Type" and "Conditions of Existence"— 1859 , p. 206, for example (see
my extensive treatment of this passage on pp. 251-260), where their fundamental
character merits upper case designations from Darwin.) McCosh defines his first
principle as "a general plan, pattern, or type, to which every given object is made
to conform"; and his second as a "particular end, by which each object, while
constructed after a general model is, at the same time, accommodated to the
situation which it has to occupy, and a purpose which it is intended to serve"
(1869, p. 1). (If we call these two principles "anatomical ground plan" and
"adaptation" we will be able to make the appropriate evolutionary translation
without difficulty.)
McCosh argues that God's existence and benevolence can be inferred from
either principle—from the first by the order of taxonomy, and the abstract beauty
of bodily symmetry and structure; and from the second, by "adaptation,"* or the
exquisite fit of form to function. McCosh also notes that the second, or functional,
argument constitutes the "national signature" of British thought: "The arguments
and illustrations adduced by British writers for the last age or two in behalf of the
Divine existence, have been taken almost exclusively from the indications in
nature of special adaptation of parts" (1869, p. 6).
The main lineage of this national tradition for "natural theology" based on the
"argument from design" runs from Robert Boyle's Disquisition About the Final
Causes of Natural Things (1688) and John Ray's Wisdom of God Manifested in the
Works of the Creation (1691) in Newton's generation that promulgated what
historians call "the scientific revolution"; to a grand culmination in William Paley's
Natural Theology (1802), one of the most influential books of the 19th century; to
an anticlimax, during the 1830's, in the eight "Bridgewater Treatises" (including
volumes by Buckland and Whewell), established by a legacy from the deceased
Earl of Bridgewater for a series of volumes "on the power, wisdom, and goodness
of God, as manifested in the creation." Critics in Darwin's circle generally referred
to this series as the "bilgewater treatises."
Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as
pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain. In understanding the second pole of
Darwin's genius as the uncompromising radicalism of his new philosophy for life
and history, we must first characterize the comfortable orthodoxy up-
*The word adaptation did not enter biology with the advent of evolutionary
theory. The Oxford English Dictionary traces this term to the early 17th
century in a variety of meanings, all designating the design or suitability of an
object for a particular function, the fit of one thing to another. The British
school of natural theology used "adaptation" as a standard word for illustrating
God's wisdom by the exquisite fit of form to immediate function. Darwin, in
borrowing this term, followed an established definition while radically
revising die cause of the phenomenon.