If at any time they felt a need for a more elaborate justification of their conviction, they had it ready to their hand in the familiar argument from design. Paley, when he set this out in his famous _Natural Theology_ (1802), was only expressing with conspicuous ability the view that was then accepted in all circles from the highest to the lowest. He was preaching to those who were already in the fullest accord with his doctrine. They followed with eager approbation his reasoning about the watch that he supposed himself to have found on the heath. According to his assumption he had never seen a watch made, nor known of anyone capable of making such a thing. He concludes, nevertheless, that it must have been made by someone. "There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for {15} the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its structure, and designed its use." "Neither would it invalidate our conclusion that the watch sometimes went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right. The purpose of the machinery, the design and the designer, might be evident in whatever way we accounted for the irregularity of the movement, or whether we could account for it at all." "Nor would it bring any uncertainty into the argument if there were a few parts of the watch concerning which we could not discover, or had not yet discovered, in what manner they conducted to the general effect; or even some parts concerning which we could not ascertain whether they conducted to that effect in any manner whatever." Least of all could it be sufficient to explain that the watch was "nothing more than the result of the laws of metallic nature." "It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient operative cause of any thing. A law presupposes an agent, for it is only the mode according to which our agent proceeds: it implies a power, for it is the order according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the law does nothing, is nothing." From the watch we are led on to the eye, which exhibits a skill of design not less, but far greater, {16} than that of the man who gave us the telescope. Then follows a detailed examination of the use of the various bodily organs, the contrivances to be met with in vegetables and animals, the marvellous adaptations of anatomical structure, the provisions for the flight of birds, and for the movements of fishes; with instances of arrangements to suit particular conditions--the long neck of the swan, the minute eye of the mole, the beak of the parrot, the sting of the bee--all furnishing an ever accumulating body of irrefutable evidence to attest the existence and operation of an intelligent Author of Nature.