LECTURE XI

PALEY, AND THE ARGUMENT FROM CONTRIVANCE

PALEY sometimes argues that it is because watches are made by men that they prove design; while in other places, he holds that it because they are so put together as to point out the hours of the day.

We must therefore ask what bearing natural selection has on this statement of his argument:

(1) Living things, and their works, such as watches, exhibit peculiar evidence of usefulness.

(2) Evidence of usefulness is evidence of design.

(3) Living things and their works exhibit peculiar evidence of design.

If it is true that watches come about in order of nature, and are so joined, by natural causation, to the movements of the earth that no one who knows all the data would have the least reason to expect that men should not make and sell and buy and use them, this may well raise a doubt whether the contrivance of man is any interruption to the order of nature; but a moment's thought shows that it by no means does away with the teleological problem, or makes it any easier to solve; for it is still as true as ever it was that watches do not come about without human makers, and that they are useful to mankind and help to preserve the human species from destruction.

If the structure and orderly history of such things as eyes, and cats, and spiders' webs, and watches were all we discover in them, we might say these things are no harder to understand than inorganic bodies and their movements; for if living things are continually bringing about rearrangements of inorganic matter and physical energy, like watches, which never come about with

out them, lifeless bodies continually do the same. The tide produces changes of matter and energy which would never have been brought about in a tideless ocean, such as the gradual conversion of the earth's motion of rotation into friction between sea and land; but no one finds, in the friction which has brought the moon to rest upon its axis, anything that might not have been expected. If living bodies did no more than to bring about things which would never happen without them, no one could find in this any essential difference between them and lifeless bodies; but we do find a most significant difference in the sort of things they bring about, as Aristotle pointed out long ago. "To say what are the ultimate substances out of which an animal is formed is no more sufficient" now than it was two thousand years ago; for the distinctive things that are brought about by living beings are things that are useful to the beings which bring them about or to their species; and usefulness implies the continued existence of the user, as distinguished from the things that are used; for it does not consist in the act of use, but in something that comes after.

The words "survival of the fittest" are meaningless unless the being that survives the selective process is identical with the one that remains fit after the selective process has acted; and belief in the efficacy of natural selection involves belief in that continuity of life which, in the form we know most intimately, we call personal identity.

Just so far as natural selection tends to break down the distinction between the contrivances of man and the works of nature, just so far does it show that the distinction between subject and object; the distinction which is the fundamental problem of all systems of philosophy and the fundamental postulate of most systems of religion; the distinction between self and not-self; is coextensive with life. Since this is so, may we not still say with Paley: "Marks of design are no more accounted for than they were before. Our going back ever so far brings us no nearer to the least degree of satisfaction upon the subject"?

As the human child seems, so far as we can ascertain, to gradually discover its continued existence through consciousness and memory of the past, we are apt to think that personal identity implies con

sciousness, and is equivalent to intellectual or rational sameness or identity; but a moment's thought will show that this is not the case, for none of us have, or know whether we ever had, consciousness of our early infancy, our birth, or our embryonic history, although no naturalist can admit that there is any interruption in the continuity of our personal existence between the fertilized ovum and old age, for while birth is a notable event in the history of man and of most of the familiar animals, it is no necessary or universal stage in the development of organisms in general.

Does any one who, while unconscious, has undergone a surgical operation doubt whether he is personally identical with the unconscious patient? May not one carry to the verge of the grave the physical or mental or moral effects of an accident which occurred before his earliest recollection?

A moment's thought shows that we have the same sort of reason for belief in the continued existence of every being whose acts are useful to itself or to its species, as we have for belief in our own persistent identity through much of our own history; for, as Dr. Butler pointed out long ago, "we should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and, therefore, cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes." "To say that consciousness of our continued existence makes personal identity, or is necessary to our being the same person, is to say," as Butler shows, "that a person does not exist a single moment, or do one action, but what he can remember; indeed, none but what he reflects upon." "Present consciousness of past actions," says Butler "is not necessary to our being the same person who performed those actions," and he might have added that neither is past consciousness necessary; for it is not necessary that the acts of a being should be rational to prove personal identity, but only that they should be such that, if accompanied by mind, they would be rational. For all we know to the contrary the human ovum may be conscious, and so may the tree be, or, for that matter, the stone; but we do know that, whether living beings be conscious or not, they so respond to the changes which go on in the outer world that our reason approves their actions; and it is their fitness itself, not their consciousness of it, which proves their continued existence.

For all we know the properties of the stone may be useful to the stone, and for all we know the stone may be conscious and rational, but these words mean nothing to us; although we can see clearly that the distinctive properties of living things are useful to them or to their species. If it is said that words which mean nothing are nonsense, and that we are not to talk nonsense, we must answer that no honest confession of ignorance can be nonsense, and that the burden of proving he is not talking nonsense rests with him who asserts that stones are not conscious.

So far as I am aware Butler is the only one of the older writers on natural theology who perceived that the responsive actions of living things prove that all living things have personal identity; and, whether he be the first or not, his reasoning seems conclusive, although modern science cannot permit him to escape any of the consequences of this admission by asserting that trees are not living things.

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"Consider," he says, "a living being now existing, and which has existed for any time alive. This being must have done . . . what it has done . . . formerly, as really as it does . . . what it does... this instant. All these actions . are actions . . . of the same living being. And they are so prior to all consideration of its remembering or forgetting; since remembering and forgetting can make no alteration in the truth of past matters of fact. And suppose this being endowed with limited powers of knowledge and memory, there is no more difficulty in conceiving it to have the power of knowing itself to be the same living being which it was some time ago, of remembering some of its actions, sufferings, and enjoyments, and forgetting others, than in conceiving it to know or remember or forget anything else."1

If Butler is right, if consciousness of personal identity does not make but presupposes personal identity, we may consider the continued existence of living things quite apart from the question whether they know their continued existence; but personal identity is, so far, a phenomenon, a part of the order of objective nature, which may be studied, like other natural phenomena, by

1 The reader who is familiar with Butler will note that the words I have omitted after "done,” and in other places are "suffered and enjoyed," for the argument does not seem to demand any opinion as to the extent of the parallel between life and enjoyment and suffering.

strictly scientific methods. It also seems clear that the significance of the argument from contrivance or interference with the order of physical nature, turns on the account which science gives of this aspect of personal identity; for the discovery of natural selection forbids us to assert, before this question is answered, that the evidence of contrivance afforded by living things and their works is different from that which is afforded by inorganic bodies and their movements, inasmuch as it shows us the chain of physical causation which joins the works of man and of other living beings to that part of the order of nature to which they are adjusted.

While I cannot agree with those enthusiastic zoölogists who hold that life has been proved to be a matter of physics and chemistry, modern science seems, to me, to demand that we suspend judgment upon this difficult question, and wait for more evidence, for there seems to me to be no better basis for a negative than for an affirmative answer.

If science furnishes proof that the continuity of life is not only a natural phenomenon but a physical phenomenon, which may be expressed in terms of physical matter and mechanical energy, then, indeed, the argument from contrivance has received its death-blow; for we can no longer find, in the actions of living things, or in those of any living thing, evidence of interference with the order of physical nature. If, however, the answer which science gives is imperfect or indecisive, then I think we must admit that, while weakened by the discovery of natural selection, the argument from contrivance is not utterly destroyed. Finally, if science fails to throw any light on the origin and meaning of personal identity, then the argument from contrivance has the same value, whatever this may be, that it had before natural selection was discovered.

Two hundred and fifty years ago no one thought of asking whether living beings ever arise out of dead matter, for all believed that they never arise in any other way; and that this may be illustrated by observing how quickly dead things, like dung and rotten. meat and the carcasses of dead animals, breed maggots and flies under the influence of the hot sun.

"The proposition that life may, and does, proceed from that which has no life was held alike by the philosophers, the poets,

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