"Now the atheist must declare that all this order of the solar system was brought about by the fortuitous concourse of matter, and indicates no mind, plan, or purpose in the universe. This is absurd. A man might as well deny the fact of the law of the solar system, or the existence of the sun, or of himself, as deny that these facts, thus co-ordinated, indicate a mind, denote a plan, and serve a purpose calculated beforehand.

'Sce the same thing on a smaller scale. The composition of the air is such that first it helps to light and warm the earth, is a swaddling-garment to keep in the specific heat of the earth, and to prevent it from radiating off into the cold void spaces of the universe. Next, it helps to cleanse and purify the earth, by its free circulation as wind. Then, it promotes vegetation, carries water from the Tropics to the Norwegian pine, furnishes much of the food of plants, their means of life. Next, it helps animal life, is the vehicle of respiration; all plants that grow, all things that breathe, continually suck the breasts of heaven. Again, it is a most important instrument for the service of man. Through this we communicate by artificial light Without it, all were dumb and motionless: not a bird could sing or fly, not a cricket creak to his partner at night, not a man utter a word, and a voiceless ocean would ebb and flow upon a silent shore.

and artificial sound.

"If I should say that this sermon came by the fortuitous concourse of matter, that last Monday I shut up pen, ink, and paper in a drawer, and to-day went and found there a sermon which had come by the fortuitous concourse of pen, ink, and paper,-every man would think I was very absurd. And yet I should not commit so great a quantity of absurdity as if I were to say the composition of air came by the fortuitous concourse of atoms;' for it takes a much greater mind to bring together and compose the air which fills a thimble than to produce all the sermons and literature of the world.

"Every part of the universe is an argument against atheism as a theory thereof."-Theodore Parker, Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology, pp. 7—10.

7. But, the laws of nature! inflexible, insensible, but allmoving; do they not reduce the universe to a regular perpetuallygoing piece of clockwork, and exclude mind by filling all with lifeless iron mechanism. Trace causes and effects then, O philoso

pher! examine minutely each part of what you see, and say if the phantasm of a Causing Mind will not be gradually pushed out of the universe.

"Yes, by resting in a minute examination of parts only, and overlooking the result of each whole. Thus might mind be excluded from man and his works. What work of art is there, in which the aim and intent, i. e. the mind, of the artist may not be missed, if we confine our attention to groping amongst the details? The examination of these may let us into the secret of the means which he has employed to bring about his purpose; but to seize this purpose, and read his meaning, we must look at the whole working and effect. Is it a sufficient explanation of the steam-engine to give, in correct detail, the connexion and dependence of each of its parts; to show how the working of one part must necessarily follow the action of the preceding; to state that the water must be raised from the well, because the upward motion of the bucket is the necessary sequence of the motion of the wheel, as this is caused inevitably by the motion of the beam, which follows of necessity the stroke of the piston, which could not but result from the pressure of the steam, which must proceed from the action of heat upon the water in the boiler? And here might an indefinite further chain of mechanical causes be supposed; but this tracing of the chain of sequences leaves all the while unexplained the cause of the whole work. Each successive link suggests more forcibly the idea of something more, which arranged the train of material causes and effects, so as to end in an apparently contemplated result.

"This explanation of the sequence of action in the successive parts would seem an absurdity, if offered as the sufficient cause of any piece of human art. Why, then, should it satisfy us any more in the works of nature? The chains of cause and effect in these are longer, and reach back farther, than we can follow; in few of them, if any, can we arrive at the link where the Causing Mind itself operated upon matter. Nevertheless, here matter seems no more gifted with the power of arranging itself, than in brass wheels and iron bars; nor of contemplating, any more than they, the beautiful and useful result in which this long chain of adaptation ends. Do the sun, the rain, the soil, the roots, and the sap-vessels, take counsel together to form the flower? If they do not, something else must; or the flower appears before us as a fortunate accident. What a vast assemblage of fortunate accidents make up the universe! For

here, millions of chains of causes and effects end in results beneficial to sentient beings; and all these separate results harmonize together in a beautiful whole.

"The more science advances, the more does it appear that all parts of nature are connected. Not only is the air about us adapted to the organs of plants and animals; but the light from the farthest star finds itself at home on the retina of man.

. What is this Something, which has tied all nature together in a mysterious and beautiful connexion? What answer can satisfy us as to this deepworking and all-pervading somewhat?--Cause and effect?--an inherent property of Order in matter?-a Law of nature? None of these; but a Causing Mind."--Hennel's Christian Theism, pp. 30-32.

8.The present is not the place for even the briefest summary of the arguments which have been adduced by teleologists and antiteleologists from Democritus and Plato down to Comte and Whewell. The writer would merely remark that in the degree in which the reasoning faculty is developed on this planet, and is exercised by our species, it appears to be a more healthy and normal condition of such faculty,--certainly one which has been productive of most accession to truths, as exemplified in the mental workings of an Aristotle, a Galen, a Harvey, and a Cuvier,—to admit the instinctive impression of a design or purpose in such structures as the valves of the vascular system and the dioptric mechanism of the eye. In regard to the few intellects they have ever been a small and unfruitful minority-who do not receive that impression and will not admit the validity or existence of final causes in physiology, the writer has elsewhere expressed his belief that such intellects are not the higher and more normal examples, but rather manifest some, perhaps congenital, defect of mind, allied or analogous to 'colour-blindness' through defect of the optic nerve, or the inaudibleness of notes above a certain pitch through defect of the acoustic nerve.”—Owen, Paleontology, p. 313.

9.If chance hath formerly produced such things, how comes it that it doth not sometimes now produce the like? Whence becomes it, for so many ages altogether impotent and idle? Is it not the same kind of cause; hath it not the same instruments to work with, and the same materials to work upon? The truth is, as it doth not now, so it did not, and never could, produce such effects. They are plainly improper and incongruous to such a cause. Chance never

chance never

writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will, nor can, without absurdity, be supposed able to do them, which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree. "-Barrow, Sermon's on the Creed, Serm. V1.

10. "The stone doth not deliberate whether it shall descend, nor the wheat take counsel whether or not it shall grow. Even men do not advise how their hearts shall beat, though without that pulse they cannot live. What then can be more clear than that those natural agents which work constantly, for those ends which they themselves cannot perceive, must be directed by some high and over-ruling wisdom, and who is that but the great Artificer who works in all of them? For art is so far the imitation of nature that, if it were not in the artificer but in the thing itself which by art is framed, the two were one and the same. Were that which frames a watch within it, and all those curious wheels wrought without the hand of man, it would seem to grow into that form, nor would there be any distinction between the making of that watch, and the growing of a plant. * Now what the artificer is to works of art, that is the Maker of all things to all natural agents; directing all their operations to ends which they cannot apprehend; and thus appears the Maker to be the Ruler of the world, the Steerer of this great ship, the Law of this universal commonwealth, the General of all the hosts of heaven and earth. For, as 'every house is builded by some man,' and the earth bears no such creature of itself; stones do not grow into a wall, or first hew and square, then unite and fasten themselves together; trees sprout not cross like dry and sapless beams, nor spars and tiles arrange themselves into a roof; as these are the supplies of art, and testimonies to the understanding of man, the great artificer on earth, so is the world itself but a house, the habitation and the handiwork of an Infinite Intelligence, and 'He who built all things is God.'"-Pearson On the Creed, Art. I.

* Paley's celebrated illustration was probably suggested by this passage.

C.

ON INSTINCT GENERALLY CONSIDERED.

The following remarks on Mr. Darwin's Chapter on Instinct are published here by permission of the able and eminent scholar to whom I am indebted for them :-

"There is a good deal of confusion through the chapter on Instinct between instincts and habits. It strikes me that the differences between wild and domestic animals belong to the head of habits, not of instincts; i.e. such habits as may confessedly become hereditary. It is by laws identical with those of habit that man has imposed peculiarities, to suit his own purposes, on many classes of domesticated creatures: but I can see no explanation that could be given for the superiority of the hive-bee's architecture over that of the melipona which would be analogous to the influence of man's company and authority over the different habits of the domestic dog.

"But do we get any nearer to a definition of instinct if we call it congenital habit: i.e. habit which has not become hereditary by mere exception to the generally personal character of habits, but which is hereditary by its very essence and necessity? This is more like his meaning, I fancy: and this adjective congenital would enable us to divide the subject into two convenient heads: it would confine the analogy to present definition, while implying that the mode of production is not the same: the very distinction which he seems to urge.

"How then does he defend his new account of the mode in which instincts were produced, before they became hereditary and congenital? Believers say that they were impressed by God on the species which He independently created. Darwin says, that they sprang from a small dose of habit, plus a much larger dose of natural selection, and extended more to the individual than to the class. Now this cannot be proved, unless he can catch, in transitu, some indications of the process he describes. If he soars into the "great might-have-been," he must at any rate give us plenty of frontier or travelling instances to prove the correctness of the direction of his flight. This he is conscious of, and this he aims at: but not, as I think, with much success.

"In this chapter, as throughout the book, he is hampered by the absence of any present movement in the direction he requires. His