Natural History 139the famous thesaurus, declared in his Bridgewater Treatise that with the
single principle of design, he had been able to marshal the facts of natural
history into a “methodized order,” to unite them into “comprehensive
generalizations” and to establish their “mutual connections.” He was thus
able to bring “a unity of design, and that scientifi c form, which are gener-
ally wanting in books professedly treating of Natural Theology” while at
the same time, cherishing the hope that his work “might prove a useful
introduction to the study of Natural History.”^107
It was but a small step from these pious efforts to more heterodox
accounts of the later nineteenth century.^108 In his Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation (1844), Robert Chambers thus spoke of a divine prin-
ciple that permeated the natural world. God was “present in all things,”
and all things conformed to an “original divine conception.” A single
law governed both natural orders: “The inorganic has one fi nal and com-
prehensive law—Gravitation. The organic, the other great department of
mundane things, rests in like manner on one law, and that is—Develop-
ment.”^109 Ironically, just as Newton’s assertion that gravity is the constant
and lawful activity of the Deity had led to the naturalistic assertion that
God was no longer necessary to explain the phenomena of attraction,
so too with the claim that a single divine principle pervaded the organic
world. Charles Darwin (1809–82), perhaps the most famous naturalist of
them all, also claimed that a single selective principle lay beneath the
origin of the diverse species. This principle did not seem to require direct
divine activity, yet in a sense represents the culmination of the whole
theological tradition of natural history in its quest for a single explana-
tory principle for the diversity of living things. Thus in the frontispiece of
the sixth edition of the work for which he is most famous, On the Origin
of Species (originally published in 1859), Darwin could quote from the
Bridgewater Treatise of William Whewell (1794–1866): “with regard to
the material world... we can perceive that events are brought about not
by isolated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case,
but by the establishment of general laws.” In another, perhaps uninten-
tionally ironic gesture, Darwin cites in the same place Francis Bacon on
the study of the book of nature. In fact Darwin’s Origin of Species signaled
the end of the dominance of Bacon’s infl uential philosophy of science.
Darwin had come to the recognition that the Baconian ideal of natural
history would mean the indefi nite postponement of theorizing and that
no general laws of absolute certainty would emerge from the inductive
processes as Bacon had hoped. Darwin proposed instead the formulation
of hypotheses that would guide the collection of facts. Natural selection
was thus proposed not as a certain law, but as the most probable explana-