The design argument is drawn from the analogies of human experience. From the relation which human works bear to human thoughts and feelings, it infers a corresponding relation between works more or less similar, but superhuman, and superhuman thoughts and feelings. _If_ it prove these, nobody but a metaphysician needs care whether or not it proves a mysterious _substratum_ for them.[236] The argument from design, it seems to us, however, would have no validity if there be no external world offering marks of design. If the external world is only a mode of feeling, a series of mental states, then our notion of the Divine Existence may be only "an association of feelings"--a mode of Self. And if we have no positive knowledge of a real self as existing, and God's existence is no more "real than our own," then the Divine existence stands on a very dubious and uncertain foundation. It can have no very secure hold upon the human mind, and certainly has no claim to be regarded as a fundamental and necessary belief. That it has a very precarious hold upon the mind of Mr. Mill, is evident from the following passage in his article on "_Later Speculations of A. Comte_."[237] "We venture to think that a religion may exist without a belief in a God, and that a religion without a God may be, even to Christians, an instructive and profitable object of contemplation." And now let us close Mr. Mill's book, and, introverting our mental gaze, interrogate _consciousness_, the verdict of which, even Mr. Mill assures us, is admitted on all hands to be a decision without appeal.[238] [Footnote 235: "Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy," vol. i. p. 254.] [Footnote 236: "Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy," vol. i. p. 259.] [Footnote 237: Westminster Review, July, 1835 (American edition), p. 3.] [Footnote 238: "Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy," vol. i. p. 161.]