CHAPTER IV.

CONCERNING THE TRUE DOCTRINE OF FINAL CAUSE OR DESIGN IN NATURE.

I. Is there Design in Nature?

IF on shaking a quantity of type in a basket it should appear that some of the pieces, when they fell, stuck together in such order as to compose the story of Moses in the bulrushes, could we resist the conclusion that these particular types were loaded with the design of composing that story on condition that they were well shaken? Indeed, we should see far more design in type thus endowed than in ordinary" pie," from which an intelligible sentence can be formed only by the direct efforts of a highly skilled workman. We read the design in the complicated and intelligible adaptation of the final result. It is no prejudice to our conclusion to show that the forces producing this delicate adaptation have passed through a variety of transformations, and that their origin is out of sight. Whatever that might prove, it would in no manner disprove origination in an intelligent designer. Modern science is not inimical to the Paleyan

argument when properly understood, but is rather a positive supporter of it. We hear much about the conservation of force. Energy may be cast down from one seat and another, but it cannot be destroyed. It is protean in its forms. There is a principle of continuity in nature. Lines of force which we see in operation in present phenomena may be traced backward into more indefinite, because less known, forms; but they cannot be run so far back as to project beyond adequate causation. It is precisely so with the evidence of design in complicated adaptations of nature. Chance produces nothing definite and orderly.1 Nature" conserves" design as much as it does force, and in much the same manner.

"One day at Naples," says a French writer, "a certain person in our presence put six dice into a dice-box, and offered a wager that he would throw sixes with the whole set. I said that the chance was possible. He threw the dice in this way twice in succession; and I still observed, that possibly he had succeeded by chance. He put back the dice into the box for the third, fourth, and fifth

1 How little sense there is in attributing orderly manifestations to chance, especially such adaptations as those by which we live and move and have our being, we have shown at various points in the two preceding chapters; see also the author's Logic of Christian Evidences, Part II.; and Hill's Natural Sources of Theology, p. 77 f.; J. S. Mill's Inductive Logic, Book iii., chapters 17 and 18; Bowen, on Metaphysical and Ethical Science, pp. 165–171; Jevons's Principles of Science, Vol. i. p. 225 ff.

time, and invariably threw sixes with the whole set. 'By the blood of Bacchus,' I exclaimed, 'the dice are loaded'; and so they were. Philosophers, when I look at the order of nature that is constantly reproduced, its fixed laws, its successive changes, invariably producing the same effect, when I consider that there is but one chance which can preserve the universe in the state in which we now see it, and that this always happens, in spite of a hundred millions of other possible chances of perturbation and destruction, I cry out,' Surely, Nature's dice are also loaded.""1

The adaptations which we behold in such profusion in nature may, each of them, with respect both to their secondary causes and their final causes, be compared to a river like the Mississippi, flowing past our doors. We shall not be able to dispense with the idea of design in the location of the river by showing that the channel was not dug by the use of spades and the material removed on wheelbarrows; for that is only one way, and is not God's way, of forming a canal. The nature of the instrument used in accomplishing an object has nothing whatever to do with the fact of a design. We may, if we please, trace the Mississippi back through all its numerous tributaries to the raindrops and the skies, but we are still in a charmed and closed cir

1 The Abbé Galiani in discussion with Diderot, translated and quoted by Bowen from Dugald Stewart's notes.

cle of "principles of order," combining for definite results. We never in our investigations get within sight of chaos. What is science but a study of orderly operations? Where order seems to cease, the scientific investigator pauses in bewilderment. 'Principles of order" compass his path and his lying down, they beset him behind and before. If he ascend up into heaven they are there: if he take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall they lead him.

In any case of secondary causation we do not care, so far as the argument for the existence of an intelligent designer is concerned, at how many, or at what points, the various elements of design entered. The inference of design in nature is drawn from complexity and nicety of adaptation. This inference need not be affected by any new view of the mode of origination, and cannot be rebutted, except by assigning a sufficient physical cause, irrespective of intelligence. If any one asserts that these adaptations arise from necessity, he is bound to show by what necessity. Until that is shown, the inference of an intelligent cause is as good as it ever was, however much our conception of nature's intricate machinery may be enlarged. Man is himself a designer. The hypothesis that the adaptations of nature had their origin in design is, to say the least, more

intelligible than that which ascribes them to necessity. Certainly it devolves upon those who deny or refuse to recognize design in organic complexity, to do more than push back one step, or one hundred steps, the point at which the designing impulse may have been given. They must draw lines of circumvallation around the whole field, and cut off every avenue of approach, or the argument for design will enter with all its force in spite of them. Sober-minded naturalists do not attempt this task. We do not envy the success of those philosophers who have undertaken it; for, it is as hard to banish the idea of final cause as of efficient causation, and for precisely the

same reason.

In the case referred to, of type arranging itself to compose the story of Moses, there is a remarkable accumulation of designs. In type set up by a printer a very large part of the combination of designs originates in his work. But he did not prepare the type, nor did the type-founder compose the story. In this case the skill of the typesetter is called into requisition because the typemaker had not the power or the inclination to go farther in his design than to get the material in readiness for the more specific work of the printer. But if this type, when shaken sufficiently by horse power in the cellar, would in a square box become Milton's Sonnet on his Blindness, in a round