Murphy[297] has brought strongly forward the evidence of "intelligence" throughout organic nature.

He believes "that there is something in organic progress which mere Natural Selection among spontaneous variations will not account for," and that "this something is that organizing intelligence which guides the action of the inorganic forces, and forms structures which neither Natural Selection nor any other unintelligent agency could form." {277} This intelligence, however, Mr.Murphy considers may be unconscious, a conception which it is exceedingly difficult to understand, and which to many minds appears to be little less than a contradiction in terms; the very first condition of an intelligence being that, if it knows anything, it should at least know its own existence.
Surely the evidence from physical facts agrees well with the overruling, concurrent action of God in the order of nature; which is no miraculous action, but the operation of laws which owe their foundation, institution, and maintenance to an omniscient Creator of whose intelligence our own is a feeble adumbration, inasmuch as it is created in the "image and likeness" of its Maker.
This leads to the final consideration, a difficulty by no means to be passed over in silence, namely the ORIGIN OF MAN.

To the general theory of Evolution, and to the special Darwinian form of it, no exception, it has been shown, need be taken on the ground of orthodoxy.

But in saying this, it has not been meant to include the soul of man.
It is a generally received doctrine that the soul of every individual man is absolutely created in the strict and primary sense of the word, that it is produced by a direct or supernatural[298] act, and, of course, that by such an act the soul of the first man was similarly created.

It is therefore important to inquire whether "evolution" conflicts with this doctrine.
Now the two beliefs are in fact perfectly compatible, and that either on the hypothesis--1.