that now exists." Only out of rational choice can order have come. The most common mode, perhaps, of evading the problem which order presents to reason, is the indication of the process by which the order has been realised. From Democritus to the latest Darwinian there have been men who supposed that they had completely explained away the evidences for design in nature when they had described the physical antecedents of the arrangements appealed to as evidences. Aristotle showed the absurdity of the supposition more than 2200 years ago. But those who deny final causes have gone on arguing in the same irrational manner down to the present time. They cannot, in fact, do otherwise. They are committed to a false position, and they dare not abandon the sophism on which it rests. Nothing else can explain how any sane mind should infer that because a thing is conditioned it cannot have been designed. The man who argues that the eye was not constructed in order to see because it has been so constructed as to be capable of seeing, is clearly either unable to reason correctly, or allows his reasoning faculty to be terribly perverted by prejudice. That a result is secured by appropriate conditions can seem to no sound and unprejudiced intellect a reason for regarding it to have been undesigned. And yet what other reason is involved in all the attempts to explain away final causes by means of the nebular, Darwinian, and other development hypotheses? M. Comte imagines that he has shown the inference of design, from the order and stability of the solar system, to be unwarranted, when he has pointed out the physical conditions through which that order and stability are secured, and the process by which they have been obtained. He refers to the comparative smallness of the planetary masses in relation to the central mass, the feeble eccentricity of their orbits, the moderate mutual inclination of their planes, and the superior mean density of their solid over their fluid constituents, as the circumstances which render it stable and habitable, and these characteristic circumstances, as he calls them, he tells us flow naturally and necessarily from the simple mutual gravity of the several parts of nebulous matter. When he has done this, he supposes himself to have proved that the heavens declare no other glory than that of Hipparchus, of Kepler, and of Newton.