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Show 360 JJARWINIANA. sensible meauing ; so we conclude that he regards brutes as automata, and was thinking of design as coextensive merely with general conceptions. Not concerning ourselves with the difficulty he may have in drawing a line between the simpler judgments and affections of man and those of the highest-endowed brutes, we subserve our immediate ends by remarking that the automatic theory would seem to be one which can least of all dispense with design, since, either in the literal or current sense of the word, undesigned automatism is, as near as may be, a contradiction in terms. As the automaton man constructs manifests the designs of its maker and mover, so the more efficient automata which man did not construct would not legitimately suggest less than hnman intelligence. And so all adaptations in tl;te animal and vegetable world · which irresistibly suggest purpose (in the sense now accepted) would also suggest design, and, under the law of par~imony, claim to be thus interpreted, unless some other hypothesis will better account for the facts. We will consider, presently, if any other does so. We here claim only that some beings other than men design, and that the adaptations of means to ends in the structure of animals and plants, in so far as they carry the marks of purpose, carry also the implication of having been designed. Also, that the idea or hypothesis of a designing mind, as the author of Nature-however we came by it-having possession of the field, and being one which man, himself a designer, seemingly must J;leeds form, cannot be rivaled · except by some other equally adequate for explana- EVOLUTIONARY TELEOLOGY. 361 tion, or displaced except by showing the illegitimacy of the inference. As to the latter. is the common apprehension and sense of mankind i~ this regard well gro~nded ~ Can we rightly reason from our own int~ lhgence an~ powers to a higher or a supreme intelligence ordermg and shaping the system of Nature~ A yery able and ingenious writer upon " The Evid~? ces of Design in Nature," in the Westminster ReVM: O for July, 1875, maintains the negative. His article may be taken as the argument in support of the position assumed by "P. C. W.," in the Oontemp~ r~ry Review above cited. It opens with the admiSSIOn that the orthodox view is the most simple and app.are~tly convincing, has had for centuries the unhesitatmg assent of an immens~ majority of thinkers and th~t the. late~t master-writer upon the subject dis: ~osed to reJect It, namely, Mill, comes to the concluSIOn that, "in the present state of our knowledO'e the ad~~tat~ons in Nature afford a large balance 5 of probability In favor of creation by intelligence." It proceeds to attack not so much the evidence in favor of de.sign as the foundation upon which the whole do.ctrme rests, and closes with the prediction that sooner or later the superstructure must fall. And truly, if his reasonings are legitimate and his con: elusions just, "Science has laid the axe' to the tree." ".G "1 ven a se~ ?f ~ar~s ':hich we look upon in huma:n pro-· druu,c tiOns as unfmlmg mdiCatwns of design , " he asks , " 1· s no t th e 1 erence equally legitimate when we recognize these marks in Nature~ To gaze on such a universe as this to feel our hearts oxult ~itbin us in the fu1lness of existence, 'and to offer in explanatiOn of such beneficent provision no other word but |