But while science as such, in strict obedience to its canons, must stop at the self-adjustment of immediate phenomena, and materialism will stop there, the reasoning faculties of the race, as we have seen, will not stop there. They must come at last, by the laws of reason, upon the power and the intelligence by which the methods of nature were made self-acting. Gravitation and the properties of water will account for the perfect adaptation of the river to its bed, and the bed to the purpose of a river. But how came gravity? How came the properties of water? There may be, there is, no direct design in the path of the Amazon or the Danube; but surely there is magnificence in the design that caused the great, the cosmic _methods_ of nature so to co-operate as to cause those rivers inevitably to carve their perfect paths? The dynamics of nature are self-acting up to the very limit of our power of research; but after that, and beyond it, what? Why is the _direction_ of nature’s dynamical methods always and everywhere, through all time and space, beneficent and beautiful? It is only the design, the teleology, of the old school, touched by the Ithuriel spear of modern knowledge, and changing into a conception of universal design, that can only have originated in an infinite mind. The ‘law of evolution’ and that of ‘variation and the survival of the fittest’ may, if you will, be held to account for all that narrower knowledge had attributed to direct design. But evolution, like gravitation, is only a method; and the self-adjustments demonstrated in the ‘origin of species’ only make it, to reason, the clearer, that variation and survival is a method that took its origin in mind. It is true that the egg of a moth, and the eye of a dogfish, and the forearm of a tiger _must_ be what they are to accomplish the end of their being. But that only shows, as we shade our mental eyes, and gaze back to the beginning, the magnificence of the design that was _in_volved in nature’s beginning, so as to be _e_volved, by the designed rhythm of nature’s methods. Whatever matter may be; whatever force is; or whether or not both are the one inseverable product of omnipotent volition; the first affection of matter by force carried with it, potentially, the finished purpose of the All-wise, whatever that may be. Every instance of what such writers as Darwin are obliged to write of as ‘contrivance’ or ‘adaptation’ throughout this universe as it now is, or that shall yet arise in it through all duration, are, and will be, but factors of related harmony in a stupendously vast interlocked ‘mosaic’ of design, which in its entirety has a ‘final purpose’ too great for man to see. It is admitted by the fullest and farthest thinkers, that the teleological, and the mechanical views, of phenomena and their origin, are not antagonistic. Instead of mutually excluding each other in thought, they are the complement of each other.