reminds us that "his first book fell dead-born from the press; few of its successors had a much better fate. The uneducated masses were, of course, beyond his reach; amongst the educated minority he had but few readers; and amongst the few readers still fewer who could appreciate his thoughts."* Add to this that Hume, though deeming himself a match for the philosophers and theologians of his time, had a secret dread of that religious pugnacity in the common people of Scotland which is so quickly roused against an assailant of popular beliefs, and therefore kept back, to be published after his death, his Dialogues on Natural Religion," the book most fitted to provoke that acrimonious criticism which insures literary success. Now, however, within a century of its first appearance, we find this masterly product of Hume's dialectics still acknowledged as the standard treatise of philosophical scepticism. Scotch philosophers since his day have laboured to reform philosophy in the light of Hume's criticism; Kant attempted to refute his scepticism; John Stuart Mill virtually built upon Hume; and he has lately been revived in Germany, with the honour of translation and the prestige of authority. His fame grows with time. This is due partly to the beauty of Hume's style, and the clearness and depth of his reasoning; due also to the decline of theological asperity, and the growth of a tolerant spirit among various schools of thought; and due not a little to the tone of audacity,—or what he himself styled "a certain boldness of temper,"-with which Hume assailed convictions which had come to be accepted as axioms both in philosophy and in religion. And I am of opinion also that no small part of the favour which has accrued to Hume is due to the metaphysical fallacies which have sprung up side by side with the scientific facts which have discredited Paley. The whole history of science discloses a disposition to metaphysical speculation awakened by each new discovery in physical nature. With every fresh deposit of facts upon the borders of science comes a fresh brood of fallacies upon the adjacent borders of hypothesis; and the progenitors of these have a natural affinity for the greatest of sceptics, who was notably the dupe of his own fallacies. This phenomenon of the simultaneous generation of fact and fallacy is itself worthy of scientific investigation. But it is enough to note it here as showing that the failure of Paley's demonstration of God in Nature should not drive us over to Hume's contradiction, which is demonstrably a fallacy.

* Chap. i. 1.

Paley's statement of the doctrine of an end in Nature was from the first open to these two objections.

(1) Instead of formulating a proposition to be proved, or pointing to the sources from which the conviction of its truth arises in the mind, Paley tacitly assumed the thing in question, and wrapped this assumption in a self-repeating phrase which he sought to strengthen by multifarious illustrations.

(2) Assuming that design or contrivance exists in the whole field of Nature, Paley was betrayed into the use of illustrations, sometimes far-fetched, sometimes superficial or lacking confirmation, which wear the appearance of making out a case.

"There cannot be design without a designer, contrivance without a contriver," was the axiom upon which Paley built up his treatise. He does not seem to have been aware,-at least, he takes no notice of the fact, that Hume had assailed this axiom, and the very illustration of the watch by which Paley so triumphantly asserts it, at the one point at which it might be vulnerable, and if vulnerable, then worthless to Paley's end, viz., that the axiom rests solely upon experience, and holds only within the range of possible human action and observation. Though Hume's assertion is a fallacy, yet he had put it so plausibly that Paley could not afford to pass it by; and by leaving his fundamental premise open to doubt and contradiction, Paley failed to establish the existence of a Supreme Being from traces of design in Nature, however curious and multiplied. Indeed, he himself fell into the common fallacy of begging the question in the very statement of it.

That design implies a designer is as obvious as that thought implies a thinker; but the materialist denies personality to the thinking substance; and to apply the term design to every hint of adaptation in Nature, in the sense of an intelligence shaping matter to an end, is to assume the existence of God in the very form of proving it.

It was also an error of Paley that he sought to make out the goodness of the end, as part of the evidence of a supreme contriver; or at least to show the preponderance of good over evil in apparent ends. In this endeavour he was sometimes so unfortunate as to throw the weight of his illustration into the opposite scale. Thus, in asserting that "teeth were made to eat, not to ache," he failed to dispose of the fact that they do ache, as an objection to any ruling design in their structure and composition. Their aching is not always due to some violation of nature, since wild beasts in our Zoological Gardens sometimes require dental surgery. It will not quiet the jumping tooth-ache, nor ease a neuralgic nerve to assure the sufferer that teeth and nerves were not made for the purpose

of giving pain. Indeed, it is quite a popular fancy that nerves are demons of evil. The whence and the wherefore of evil must be taken into view in forming an estimate of the end for which a thing was made, of unity and wisdom in its design, or of any purpose whatever in its existence. But the question of a final cause in things is not to be set aside by some single characteristic or quality of a thing which seems to mark it as useless or even injurious.

That every event argues a cause is an intuitive, not an experimental, conviction of the human mind. Whether the cause is intelligent and purposing, or is only a material or an accidental antecedent, is to be determined by observation and analysis of the thing itself in its place, and its relations. Moral qualities or purposes, suggested by certain properties of a thing as inhering in the Cause,-if Cause there be,-do not necessarily enter into the proof of the existence of an intelligent Cause, which might be either good or evil. Stripping Paley's statement of its verbal assumptions, and setting aside such of his illustrations as are crude or antiquated, his fundamental argument for the Creator as evinced by the traces of design in Nature is not only tenable in face of the more recent discoveries of science, but is illustrated and confirmed by a far richer array of natural phenomena than Paley had ever imagined. We may improve, however, upon his statement of the doctrine of final causes as follows: The perceived collocation or combination of phenomena or forces in Nature toward a given result, produces in the mind the immediate conviction of an intelligent purpose behind such phenomena and forces. This statement, while it retains the essence of Paley's axiom, avoids his logical vice of including in the definition the very term to be defined. A fixed series of events may be mechanical; but the combination of several independent series of phenomena toward a distinctive result must be referred to Thought purposing that event. Nature with all her forces and material has never produced a single thing that answers to the idea of an invention. This is always the product of human intelligence applied to the powers and substances of Nature. The contrivance seen in a machine instantly refers us to the mind as its cause. Thus, electricity is a power everywhere present in Nature; yet electricity has never produced an electrical machine, an electric telegraph or telephone, or an electric light. But though Nature cannot turn her own powers into a practical machine, and the least hint of an adaptation of these powers to the purposes of man suggests the intervention of the human intellect, yet the natural powers which man subordi

nates to his intelligent uses remain greater and more wonderful than the inventions to which they are applied. Are then the powers and substances of Nature which stand, as it were, waiting for the touch of the inventor's genius to make them available wherever mind shall lead the way, themselves mere things of chance or products of material law with no intent in their existence? When made available do they proclaim intelligence, and yet is the marvellous property of availability only a meaningless phenomenon of matter? Hitherto the phraseology of the doctrine of design, and the illustrations of the doctrine, have had a certain coarseness of fibre, suggesting a mechanical universe turned out by what Cowper styles "the great Artificer of all that moves," and needing the constant oversight of the Maker to keep it in working order. The sublime personifications of the creation in the Bible have been literalized by our matter-of-fact philosophy, as though the differential calculus could measure the astronomy of Job or of the 19th Psalm. But science, by bringing us into nearer contact with what Tyndall has called the "subsensible world," has at once. enlarged the sphere of our vision, and heightened its powers. Teleology addresses itself to some finer sense within. widens its circle without changing its centre. The mechanism of the universe drops away, and we find or feel the Thought of the Infinite Mind projecting itself in the actual through finite forms, and combining and comprehending the whole in an ever-unfolding purpose. Hence, we may say with von Baerenbach, "Darwin has not rendered Teleology impossible under any and every form, but has conducted philosophical science to another and the true conception of design."* True, von Baerenbach would find the solution of the universe in Monism; but his testimony from a scientific point of view shows that the question of Causality cannot be laid aside, and that, after all sciences, Nature persistently demands the Wherefore of her own phenomena.

It

Zeller, of Berlin, in his paper read before the Academy of Science "upon the Teleological and the Mechanical interpretations of Nature in their application to the universe," seeks to combine the necessary in Nature with the purposive in Reason. "Since, on all sides, the investigation of Nature, so far as it has been carried, shows us a firm linking together of cause and effect, we must assume from the coherence of all phenomena, that the same holds also of those which have not yet been investigated and explained, that everything in the

*"Gedanken ueber die Teleologie in der Natur," von Friedrich von Baerenbach. Berlin, 1878, p. 5.

world proceeds from its natural cause, according to natural laws, and therefore nothing can here be brought in of the intervention of an active purpose bearing upon this fixed result, distinct from natural necessity. Yet we cannot consider these natural causes as barely mechanical; for their effects reach far beyond that which can be explained by motion in space, or resolved into such motion. And if from these same causes along with inorganic nature, life also, and along with irrational life also conscious and rational existence have appeared, not as it were by mere accident in course of time, but necessarily by virtue of their natures, do proceed and ever have proceeded; if the world never can have been without life and intelligence, since the same causes which now produce life and reason must already from eternity have worked, and therefore have produced these continually, so must we call the world, as a whole, in spite of the natural necessity which rules in it, indeed, rather on account of this, at the same time the work of absolute Reason. That this Reason should have been guided in its action by proposed ends, is indeed not necessary.

"Yet, inasmuch as it is one and the same cause from which in the last analysis all effects spring, inasmuch as all the laws of Nature only show the art and manner in which these causes, following the necessity of their existence, work toward many sides, so from the totality of these operations must necessarily proceed a world harmonious in all its parts, a world complete in its way, and arranged with absolute conformity to purpose."*

A point of still higher moment to the argument Zeller has quite overlooked, viz., that in no case could the mechanical theory be adequate to the solution of the universe. Motion, indeed, might account for all the phenonena of physics, with the exception of motion itself. But, after all the facts of mechanism are disposed of, there remain the facts and forces of vitalism, which refuse to be included under mechanism. Motion cannot originate life, neither can chemistry create or evolve life. We may analyze life into all its constituents and conditions, but cannot detect the life itself. We may combine all the constituents and conditions of life, but cannot produce life. The living organism we know, but the mind demands. the cause of life-organization, and sees that this does not

* It is a groundless assumption of Zeller that because life is it has always been ; an assumption not warranted by the law of scientific induction. The rule of experience by which physicists would bind us forbids such a generalization upon phenomena of which there is no possible record. This is not scientific testimony, but speculative hypothesis.