as soon as that purpose was served, it was thrown aside, although it had been described as "so natural, so easy, and so plausible, that it invites one to admit it," as "too _natural_, too _rigid_, and too _cogent_ to be escaped from." "When I made the admission, I was going in the footsteps of Paley, and adopting his own phraseology: then I came to the conclusion to see whether it was right, and then _I gave it up_; when I found it led me to a contrary result, then I gave it up; what I supposed to be _design_ in the opening of my argument is _no longer design_. My reverend friend is wrong in supposing that _I admit design_, and yet refuse to admit the force of the _design argument_."[281] And what is the reason which now induces him to deny the existence of _design_ in Nature, and to withdraw all the admissions he had previously made? Why, simply because he conceives that, by a legitimate extension of the same analogy, the design argument may be pushed to a _reductio ad absurdum_, so as to prove first the existence of an _organized person_, "an animal God," and, secondly, an infinite series of such organized persons, since one such must necessarily presuppose another, and that again another, and so on _in infinitum_. For there are two stages in his extension of the analogy. In the first, it is extended so far as to show that the person to whom design is ascribed must necessarily be an organized Being: in the _second_, it is still further extended, so as to show that, being organized, that person must also have had a designer or maker, since organization is held to imply design, and design to imply a designer. And thus the analogy, when extended, does not lead up to one Supreme Mind, the Infinite and Eternal Creator of all things, but to an organized being, himself exhibiting marks of design in his organization, and requiring therefore, like every organism, a prior cause, and, by parity of reason, an eternal succession or infinite series of such causes.