Complex adaptation and a promised moral destination
But Nature cannot be making a careful picture made of many picked colours, unless Nature is personal.
The qualification ‘careful’ carries much of the argument. Chesterton is discussing a desirable arrangement of values, rather than simply an arrangement with many parts. Later in the chapter he specifies a proportion of reverence and defiance, and calls his second requirement for progress a ‘composite’ ideal. His claim here is that an impersonal tendency offers no assurance that the future will realize precisely the combination we ought to want. Read in that setting, the painter supplies both an intended destination and a judgment of its value. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter VII, paragraphs beginning ‘If the distinction be not evident,’ ‘This, however, is hardly our main point,’ and ‘This, then, is our second requirement’.
The stronger suggestion that impersonal nature cannot produce complicated coordination meets an objection already present in Darwin. In the first edition of On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter IV, pp. 80–84, Darwin describes selection operating amid intricate relations between organisms and their circumstances. Chapter VI, pp. 186–189, addresses the eye: inherited variations useful at successive stages can accumulate into an elaborate optical system. He expressly questions the inference from a humanly manufactured telescope to an analogous intellectual manufacture of the eye. His proposed mechanism therefore concerns coordinated parts, not merely indefinite growth along one scale. Darwin, inspected 1859 first edition, Darwin Online transcription F373.
That comparison exposes a limit without settling Chesterton's ethical question. Explaining how a complex structure develops does not establish that history is guaranteed to produce a just society. Conversely, denying that guarantee does not demonstrate that every complex natural structure requires a personal arranger. The paragraph's move from ‘many picked colours’ to an artist is most persuasive if ‘picked’ already means selected for a consciously valued end; if it means only a highly specific arrangement, the conclusion requires further argument. This is a comparison of arguments, not evidence that Darwin was the passage's particular intended interlocutor.
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