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Show 368 DARWINIAN A. been given to us by a deity because we prize them, is eridently to move round and round in a vicious circle. · " The same rejoinder is easily applicable to the argument from beauty, which indeed is only a particular aspect of the argument from utility. It is certainly improbable that a random daubing of colors on a canvas will produce a tolerable painting, even should the expm:iment be continued for thousands of years. Our conception of beauty being given, it is utterly improbable that chance should select, out of the infinity of combinations which form and color may afford, the precise combination which that conception will approve. But the universe is not posterior to our sense of beauty, but antecedent to it: our sense of beauty grows out of what we see; and hence the conformance of our world to our rosthetical conceptions is evidence, not of the world's origin, but of our own." We are accustomed to hear design doubted on account of certain failures of provision, waste of resources, or functionless condition of organs; but it is refreshingly new to have the very harmony itself of man with his surr01mdings, and the completeness of provision for his wants and desires, brought up as a refutation of the validity of the argument for design. It is hard, indeed, if man must be out of harmony with Nature i~1 order to judge anything respecting it, or his relations with it; if he must have experience of chaos before he can predicate anything of order. But is it true that man has all that he conceives of, or thinks would be useful, and has no "negative evidence of design afforded by the absence of a faculty" to set against the positive evidence afforded hy its presence~ He. notes that he lacks the faculty of flight, sometimes wants it, and in dreams imagines tpat he has it, yet as thoroughly believes that he was EVOLUTIONARY .TELEOLOGY. 369 designed not to .have it as that he was designed to have the faculties and organs which he possesses. He notes that some animals lack sight, and so, with this negative side of the testimony to the value of vision, he is "apt to infer creative wisdom" both in what he enjoys and in what the lower animal neither needs .nor wants. That man does not miss that which he has no conception of, and is by this limitation disqualified from judging rightly of what he can conceive and know, is what the Westminster Reviewer comes to, as follows : "We value the constitution of our world becau~e we live by it, and because we cannot conceive ourselves as living otherwise. Our conceptions of possibility, of law, of regularity, of logic, are all derived from the same source; and as we are constantly compelled to work with these conceptions, as in our increasing endeavors to better our condition and increase our provision we are constantly compelled to guide ourselves by Nature's regulations, we accustom ourselves to look upon these regularities and conceptions as antecedent to all work, even to a Creator's, and to judge of the origin of Nature as we judge of the origin of inventions and utilities ascribable to man. This explains why the argument of design bas enjoyed such universal popularity. But that such popularity is no criterion of the argument's worth, and that, indeed, it is no evidence of anything save of an unhappy weakness in man's mental constitution, is abundantly proved by the explanation itself." Well, the constitution and condition of man being such that he always does infer design in Nature, what stronger presumption could there possibly be of the relevancy of the inference~ We do not say of its correctness: that is another thing, and is not the present point. At the last, as has well been said, the ~ |