As to Paley, it gives one pleasure to quote the following passage from Sir William Thomson's address to the British Association in 1871; because the foolish writing which is so frequently met with in books and journals about "the mechanical God of Paley," about Paley representing Deity as "outside of the universe," or as "a God who makes the world after the manner that a watchman manufactures a watch," &c., can only be explained by utter ignorance of Paley's views: "I feel profoundly convinced that the argument of design has been greatly too much lost sight of in recent zoological speculations. Reaction against the frivolities of teleology, such as are to be found, not rarely, in the notes of the learned commentators on Paley's 'Natural Theology,' has, I believe, had a temporary effect of turning attention from the solid irrefragable argument so well put forward in that excellent old book. But overpowering proof of intelligence and benevolent design lies all around us; and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living beings depend upon one ever-acting Creator and Ruler." NOTE XXV., page 214. KANT'S MORAL ARGUMENT. The unsatisfactoriness of the position that conscience can supply the place of reason, and can do without its help, in the search after God, is clearly seen in the case of the thinker who undertook with most deliberation to maintain that position. When Kant said,--Although all other arguments for the existence of God are delusive, still conscience gives us a feeling of responsibility and a sense of freedom which compel us to believe in One through whom virtue and fortune, duty and inclination, will be reconciled, and in whom the will will be free to do all that it ought,--he saw that he would be met with the retort and reproach that the same process by which he pretended to have demolished the other arguments was just as applicable to this new one; that the ideas of freedom and responsibility might be as delusive when supposed to assure us of reality, as those of causation and design; that if the latter were mere forms of human thought, the former might be held to be so likewise with equal reason, and to be equally incapable of affording a warrant to belief in God Himself; and consequently, that the final religious result of his philosophy was, not that there is a God, but that there is an idea of God, which, although we cannot get rid of it, is full of contradictions, and wholly incapable of justification or verification. He saw all this as clearly as man could do, and it is marvellous that so many authors should have written as if he had not seen it; but certainly he might as well not have seen it, for all that he was able to do in the way of repelling the objection. His reply amounted merely to reaffirming that we are under the necessity of