RECORD: Campbell, George. 1867. The Reign of Law. London:
Alexander Strahan. REVISION HISTORY: Scanned, OCRed and
corrected by John van Wyhe 2002. RN1 NOTE: This book by George
Campbell, eighth Duke of Argyll and supporter of the Church of
Scotland, was his best-known attack on the evolutionary theories
of Charles Darwin and the powers ever more commonly attributed
to natural laws. These powers seemed to leave no active role for
a god and indeed were often articulated as evidence for the
nonexistence of God. Campbell argued that if natural laws
contrive the living world as Darwin argued then it is actually
God acting through those laws. So the orthodox understanding of
the world need change hardly at all. Natural laws are merely how
God controlled the world. This appropriation strategy was
exactly what George Combe in The Constitution of Man (1828) and
Robert Chambers in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1844) had done before. Whereas Combe and the author of Vestiges
were condemned for suggesting G