But till it has been proved that the working together of internal and external relations, so as to accomplish a progressive result, is not due to design, we are compelled to suppose that it is. Change may be due to chance, but it is contrary both to experience and to Reason to suppose that there can be an evolution of the higher from the lower apart from intelligence and volition. Natural selection, since it produces an intelligent result, is, after all, but another form of contrivance.

The argument from design is a strictly logical argument. I believe that my neighbour is a personal, free, intelligent being like myself, not because he has a body, but because of the consistency and purpose manifest in his words and deeds. So I believe that there is an intelligent will behind the forces of nature, because I see them exhibiting marks of adaptation, and working together for definite ends, in a similar way to that in which they work when adjusted by myself or my fellows. As Mill puts it in his Posthumous Essays: "The design argument is not drawn from mere resemblances in nature to the works of human intelligence, but from the special character of those resemblances. The circumstances in which it is alleged that the world resembles the

works of man are not circumstances taken at random, but are particular instances of a circumstance which experience shows to have a real connection with an intelligent origin, the fact of conspiring to an end. The argument, therefore, is not one of mere analogy. As mere analogy it has its weight, but it is more than analogy, it is an inductive argument." It is true, Mill goes on to say, that creative forethought is not absolutely the only link by which the origin of the wonderful mechanism of the eye may be connected with the fact of sight, that there is another connecting link, the principle, viz., of the survival of the fittest. "This principle," Mill says, "though not inconsistent with creation, would, if proved, greatly attenuate the evidence for it." I do not see that the evidence is attenuated in the very least. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest does not account for the fact that there are fittest to survive. It does not, in other words, explain the existence of organisms, nor the existence of any measure of adaptation between organism and environment. It merely expresses the method according to which it is supposed that this adaptation has been increased.

On the other hand, the atheistical argument is most illogical. In human affairs, and in human

works, except within very narrow limits, we never find order or progress, harmony or adaptation, due to anything but design. To assert, therefore, that these attributes of nature are the result of chance, is to maintain a hypothesis which is not only unwarranted, but which is absolutely contradicted by experience. Nor does an attempt to substitute for God an eternal evolution of matter conform to the test which materialists maintain to be the criterion of truth. The ultimate and primordial atoms, if they could be perceived, might no doubt be considered as "reducible to sensations;" but since they cannot be seen or touched, or apprehended by sense, they come as far short of the proof demanded as Aristotle's Tρúтη λŋ, or Hegel's "pure being."

The attempt to explain the regularity in nature on mathematical principles of probability seems to me as absurd as it is ingenious. This regularity, says Laplace," which some have considered a proof of Providence, is, on reflection, perceived to be only the development of the respective probabilities of the simple events, which ought to occur more frequently according as they are more probable." Bernoulli speaks in a similar manner. To this Mr Venn justly objects, that it is one of the relics of realism, an illustration of the tendency to ob

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jectify our conceptions, even when they have no right to exist. "A uniformity is observed sometimes, as in games of chance; it is found to be so connected with the constitution of the bodies as to be capable of being inferred beforehand, (though even here the connection is not so necessary as is supposed in cases that lie beyond the range of those vouched for by experience); then this constitution is converted into an objective probability, supposed to develop somehow into a sequence which exhibits uniformity; and finally, this questionable objective probability is assumed to exist in all cases in which uniformity is observed." The conception, Mr Venn adds, "is utterly inappropriate where the type changes," as in progressive evolution. Quetelet assumes that the number of males and females being equal, the chance of any one entry in the register being male is one half, and of two males running a quarter, and so on; hence he says, "Once in a certain number of times we shall find the births of ten males happening successively." He thinks it would be "tedious" to consult the registers, so he resorts to experiments

more expeditious, and quite as conclusive "-viz., putting forty black and forty white balls into a bag, and noting the successive colours that are drawn out. But if there be any sense or value

in such an application of the doctrines of probability, why did not Quetelet go a step further, and, putting in forty speckled balls, deduce therefrom the "objective probabilities" of hermaphrodites?

Accepting the argument from design is not accepting anthropomorphism. Xenocrates said that if the ox could think it would attribute oxality to God; and Spinoza made a similar remark about the triangle and the sphere. But there is no force in these remarks, unless oxality, triangularity, and sphericity are suggested by nature in the same manner as purpose or intelligence. Bain's objection to the argument from design is as follows: "Instead of mind being the cause of gravity, gravity and other physical forces are the sine qua non of mind. Our only expe

rience of mental manifestations is in connection with a gravitating framework of exceedingly complicated mechanism. Mind, as known by us, is the very last thing we should set up as an independent power swaying and sustaining the forces of nature. The notion that mind must be the cause of natural changes could not have arisen from a large experience. The agency of men and animals endowed with mind is a fact to be admitted; but there are other natural agencies, such as gravity, each good in its sphere, without any