lie in mechanism. The mechanism of the universe may be concluded within motion and the correlation of forces; but force is a quality, not a cause, and motion demands an origin, and beyond both lie the immensities of vitalism and of intelligence.

Hume attempted to break down the teleological argument by assailing the conception of cause and effect. He maintained that "order, arrangement, or the adjustment of final causes, is not of itself any proof of design, but only so far as it has been experienced to proceed from that principle," and also, that our experience of design, from the operations of the human mind, cannot furnish an analogy for "the great universal mind," which we thus assume to be the Author of Nature. Hence, according to Hume, before we could infer "that an orderly universe must arise from some thought and act, like the human, it were requisite that we had experience of the origin of worlds, and it is not sufficient, surely, that we have seen ships and cities arise from human art and contrivance."

The first position of Hume is refuted by the universal consciousness of mankind. Most assuredly our belief that any particular object in which we perceive the adaptation of parts to each other, or of means to an end, must have proceeded from a designing cause, does not arise out of a previous observation or experience of such cause in objects of the same class. Of the millions of men who wear watches, how very few have ever seen the parts of a watch formed and put together! Yet every possessor of a watch is sure that it had a maker; and this conviction could not be strengthened by his going to Geneva and seeing watches made by hand, or to Waltham and seeing them made by machinery.

says,

The first maker of a watch had no "experience " to follow. He used his own inventive skill. The watch existed in his mind before he shaped it in metal. And when the first watch was completed it testified of itself, to every observer, of the designing mind and the cunning hand which had produced it. And this because, as Hume himself "Throw several pieces of steel together without shape or form; they will never arrange themselves so as to complete a watch." This is not an inference from the study of such a casual heap of steel, but is an immediate and irresistible cognition of the human mind. One does not need to trace the loose bits of steel from their entrance at one end of the factory to their emergence as a completed watch at the other, in order to be satisfied that, at some point of their course, a designing hand has adjusted them to each other. The perceived adjustment

produces this conviction instantaneously; and no amount of experience could render the conviction more certain. The conviction that a particular combination of means for an end is the product of a designing cause, is not at all dependent upon the "experience" of such cause in like cases.

Neither does the conviction that adaptation proceeds. from design rest upon "experience" in any case whatever. That the adaptation of means to an end proceeds from an intelligent and purposing foresight of that end is an intuitive conviction of the human mind. To be convinced of this causal connection the mind requires neither argument nor observation; it could accept no other explanation of the existence of the event. The mind assumes this causal relation of intelligence to adaptation, in those very observations of nature or discoveries of inventive skill which Mr. Hume would include in the term "experience."

As the print of a human foot upon the sand gave to Robinson Crusoe the immediate conviction that there was another man upon what he had supposed to be his uninhabited island; as the impressions of feet, talons, fins, vertebræ, embedded in rock, certify the geologist of extinct races; so does the least token of adaptation at once articulate itself with the conception of design.

use.

In the gravel-beds of the Somme were picked up at first a few flint stones, bearing rude marks of having been shaped for No human remains were associated with them. The beds in which they lay were hitherto supposed to antedate the appearance of man; yet these shapen flints produced in every observer the instantaneous conviction that man was there at the period of this formation. When once the eye had satisfied itself that these forms were not the result of natural attrition, were not worn but shaped,-that this flint, however rudely shaped, was intended for a knife or a hatchet, this block for a hammer, this pointed stone for a spear, the mind at once pronounced it the work of man. The adaptation points to design, and the design points to a grade of human intelligence. It does not matter that we cannot divine the specific use of this or that implement; if the object itself shows that it was shaped for some use, if it is not merely a stone but an implement, there springs up at sight of it the necessary conviction that this was the work of a designing cause. Hence Hume's appeal to "experience" is fallacious in the general as well as in the particular.

Equally fallacious is Hume's objection to the analogy from the products of human design to the works of a higher intelligence. The scale of the works, the vastness of the

intelligence requisite to have conceived, and of the power to have executed them, have no place in the conviction of design. This arises from the single fact of adaptation, whether seen in the wheels of a watch or of a locomotive, in the point of a pin or the lever of a steam-engine, in the antennæ of an ant or the proboscis of an elephant. Could Lord Rosse's telescope itself be projected by a series of lenses to the farthest star within its field, this immensity of adaptation would no more exhaust the principle than does the actual size of the telescope as compared with the eye of a beetle. Size, number, magnitude have no relation to the notion of adaptation, which in and of itself produces the conviction of design.

Moreover, the human mind is the only possible unit by which we may compute the operations of "the universal mind." If we drop the argument from design, and fall back upon ontology, still the finite mind which we know in consciousness is the only agent by which, through analogy, contrast, or negation, we can attain to a conception of the Infinite.

The very observations which Hume would classify under experience "must be made and recorded by this selfsame mind; and no man has a higher confidence in the scope and the trustworthiness of its powers than the philosopher who attempts to account for the existence of Nature without either a cause or an end. But as our conception of causality and of personality, derived from consciousness, is capable of being projected from ourselves into the infinite or "universal" mind, -just as we can project a mathematical line or circle into infinite space,so adaptation seen in Nature reflects our conception of design up to the highest heaven and back to the farthest eternity.

The mathematician does not pretend to comprehend the infinities or the infinitesimals which he nevertheless conceives of as quantities in his calculations. It would require his lifetime to count up the billions which he handles so freely on a sheet of paper. The mind which can conceive of infinite number and of universal space without comprehending either, can also derive from itself the conception of a "universal mind." To do complete justice to Hume, I will now sum up his argument and my reply. In his essay on "Providence and a Future State," Hume says :—

"Man is a being whom we know by experience, whose motives and designs we are acquainted with, and whose projects and inclinations have a certain connection and coherence, according to the laws which Nature has established for the government of such a creature. When, therefore, we find that any work has proceeded from the skill and

industry of man, as we are otherwise acquainted with the nature of the animal, we can draw a hundred inferences concerning what may be expected from him; and these inferences will all be founded in experience and observation." Hence he concludes, we cannot "from the course of Nature infer a particular intelligent cause, which first bestowed and still preserves order in the universe,”* inasmuch as we have had no experience of such a cause in Nature, upon which to ground this inference.

At least three oversights or misconceptions are apparent in this statement.

(1.) Mr. Hume overlooks the fact that each man is conscious of a designing faculty within himself, and does not need to be certified of the adaptation of means to ends through the observation of this faculty in other men. There was a time when a first man invented the first machine, or adapted something to his own ends; and surely he had no experience of design in other men to create faith in himself as a designer. He put forth a conscious power; his experience of what he could accomplish confirmed his conception of design, but did not create it. So it is with us all. When we see adaptation to an end, we say at once, Here was an intelligent cause, and this not because we have observed that other men have produced designs, but knowing ourselves as intelligent designing causes, we of course refer adaptation to intelligence.

Man

(2.) This points us to Hume's second oversight; he fails to perceive that the single thing to which adaptation refers us is intelligence. It is not man in general as a being or an animal, but the intelligent spirit in man that is immediately and indissolubly connected with the notion of adaptation. does many things that are purely animal; he eats, walks, sleeps, like other animals, by an instinct or a law of his nature, and we never think of ascribing such acts to an intelligence superior to physical laws and functions. But the adaptation of means to ends we refer directly to such intelligence; and it is this thing of intelligence that differentiates such effects from purely physical sequences by the nature of their causes. Crunched bones on a desert island might suggest beasts of prey, but a cairn suggests man. An approach to such adaptation on the part of the beaver, the bee, the dog, the ant, disposes us to clothe such animals with the attribute of reason. And on the same principle,-that it is intelligence and not man we think of directly we perceive adaptation,—do we refer such adaptation in Nature to an intelligence higher than Nature

* "Prov. and Fut. State," vol. iv. p. 168.

and higher than man. It is Intelligence that we associate with adaptation, and we are not limited to intelligence as manifested by man as an animal of skill and industry. In point of fact the great advances of physical science in recent times have been due more to the imaginative and inventive faculty prompting investigation, than to inference from experience. Science itself looks forward, not backward. Its spirit is inquisitive, and its discoveries spring from the desire to know not only what is, but why it is, to reach at once the first elements of things and their final cause.

And (3.) Hume has overlooked the fact that when once this idea of the connection between adaptation and intelligence has entered the mind, from whatever source, it does not require to be renewed, but remains always as an intuitive perception; no amount of experiences can strengthen or weaken it, and this for the reason that the conviction of a designing cause does not rest in observations or experiences, greater or less, of man and his contrivances, but lies in the thing of perceived adaptation; it does not require a knowledge of the cause or source of the adaptation. That wherever there is an adaptation of means to an end, there must have been an intelligent cause is an intuition of the mind. This term intuition should not be confounded with the notion of innate ideas. An intuition is a self-evident truth; the mind may come to the knowledge of such a truth in various ways, and by many processes; but when once it is perceived, it is seen to be true, as a proposition in and of itself, which no amount of reasoning or of evidence could make clearer or stronger than it is in its own simple statement. For example, the sum of all the parts is together equal to the whole. (A child may learn this, if you please, by trying it; but once gained it is there.) Everything that begins to be must have a cause; whatever exists must exist in time and in space. To this class of self-convincing truths belongs this also, that the adaptation of means to an end springs from an intelligent and designing cause. Under these criticisms of common sense and of universal consciousness Hume's elaborate structure falls to the ground.

I am aware that this reasoning involves the interminable controversy between sensation and consciousness as the originator of ideas. But it is clear that external phenomena do not and cannot impart to us the idea of a cause. We cannot see a cause, feel a cause, hear a cause. What we perceive in Nature is never cause as a substantial entity, but only the sequence of phenomena. And yet the mind unhesitatingly affirms of every phenomenon which actually comes to pass, that it is not self-originated, but must have had a cause. Whence has the mind this conception of the necessary rela