his qualities back to certain attributes of an unknown maker of his physical and mental organism. A philosophy worthy of the name has always tended to regard the world as in some sense a vital organism, and has asked ‘What is it?’ rather than ‘What does it prove about some other being?’ “How green must be the maker of all grass” was quite a legitimate satire on all such attempts to deduce the qualities of a hypothetical creator from the phenomena of the universe. Thus the mistake of Paley and his school was fundamental. It was the mistake of seeking God in fragmentary phenomena—the same mistake, essentially, as that rebuked by Christ, by which every calamity or material blessing is regarded as a ‘judgment’ or a reward. His method, if applied with thorough-going consistency, destroys its own basis, for the One and the Many, the Whole and the Parts, cannot be apprehended at one and the same time by one and the same faculty of any human mind. Looking at phenomena alone, and thinking in that sphere, we cannot say that God made the world but rather that the world is becoming divine. Philosophically and religiously, God is all in all—historically, He is not the beginning, He is rather the end, the end in which the whole history is resumed. Paley’s elaborate argument was felt by the orthodox of his time to be called for, even though at this period his way of thinking was popular. The conception of the world as a vital organism was as yet, indeed, very vague, and unsupported by any detailed, scientific scrutiny of the facts of nature, but it was in the air—it had always been in the air; it always held the minds of cautious students back from a complete surrender to the facile but illusory way of thinking typified by Paley’s famous analogy of the universe and the watch. Bacon knew that species could be transformed by the action of a new environment.[4] Goethe had a clear conception of the evolution theory, based on a study of organic structure. Erasmus Darwin, in 1794, had uttered the great and final word: “The world has been generated rather than created.”[5] Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique was not published till 1809, nine years after Paley’s Natural Theology, but his conception of the development of special characteristics by habitual exercise and their transmission by inheritance had been freely mooted in Paley’s day, for Paley frequently takes occasion to combat it. Even the conception of natural selection as an agency in the formation of types of being may be traced in a fantastic form as far back as to Empedocles,[6] while Plato, or whoever composed a striking couplet attributed to him in the Greek Anthology, had divined the plasticity of natural forms. “Time,” he wrote, “sways the whole world; time has power in its prolonged lapse to change the names and shapes, the nature and the destiny of things.”[7]