2. The shortest way of proving this theorem, is to state that there are two ways of your obtaining a facsimile of your own person. One is to have your portrait taken, and the other is to stand before a looking-glass, and that of these two ways the former is that of design, and the latter confessedly not design, being the well-known necessary effect of certain so-called second causes, whose operation in this instance is familiar to modern science. 3. Consequently, S. D. Collet is incorrect in the principle which she makes the foundation of her argument at p. 27, where it is said, "What the Theist maintains is this, that when we see the exercise of Force in the direction of a purpose, we, by an inevitable inference, attribute the phenomenon to some conscious agent." 4. Force is seen to be exercised in the direction of a purpose--the purpose being that of producing similitude--with equal evidence in the two cases just compared; for though the force exercised in said direction is less in the case of the painter than it is in that of the looking-glass (for the resemblance produced by the former is in less degree a resemblance than that produced by the latter), the evidence cannot be said to be less, since it is no less able to convince. We are as perfectly sure that the painter could not have produced that lesser similitude of a man, and a particular man, by chance (the alternative of this supposition, according to our experience, being that he must have used design) as we are that the looking-glass could not have produced that greater similitude of a man, and a particular man, by chance (the alternative of this supposition, according to our experience, being that it must have used certain so-called laws of nature); this collective experience of ours, equally assuring us on the one hand, that the only way of the painter's achieving these effects is by design, and on the other, that the only way of the looking-glass's doing so, is by the natural agencies referred to. 5. The human experience on which the decision of this question must be founded--though not at the present era essentially different--may yet be said to be considerably so from what it was in certain former periods. In no times could mankind think and observe without becoming aware of these two principles of order--whether you call them facts or inferences--as a portion of their familiar experience. And so far as they might have compared them, they must have abundantly seen that the natural one is more powerful than the artificial one, and that the straight line or the circle must seek its perfection much rather from the plummet or the revolving radius, than from the pencil of Apelles.