common and concurrent result of all the sciences, and which is obvious to every eye. II. The argument from order and adaptation is often spoken of as "the argument from design." The phrase is an unfortunate one. The argument is not _from_ but _to_ design. To assume design and then to affirm that "every design must have a designer," is manifestly not serious reasoning, but a play upon words. To assume design at all is to assume precisely what one is most bound to prove; and to assume design in the universe is to assume what cannot be proved, yea, what the theist requires to show against the pantheist cannot be proved. In any other than a very loose and metaphorical sense design has no existence except in mind. There is no design in the sky, or the sea, or the land; there are only law, order, and arrangement therein, and these things are not designs although they imply designs. What we can describe as the designs of the lower animals are given to them with their constitutions, and are only a part of the instrumentality which fits them for their place in the world. Men have designs properly so called; but the argument for the existence of God from the evidences of a Supreme Wisdom in the progressive evolution of human history, instead of resting on these designs, is based on the fact that what has actually been realised has far transcended them. Science as a mere exposition of the facts of the universe can never show us Divine design, for the good reason that there is no such design in these facts, although, had it not existed elsewhere, they could never have been what they are. While this is true, it must in justice be added that most if not all of the advocates of theism who have presented the argument under consideration in the faulty form,--"Design implies a designer; the universe abounds in design; therefore the universe, so far as it abounds in design, implies a designer,"--have erred more in expression than in thought. In reality they have not meant by design what is properly so called, and consequently have not begun their argument by assuming what was denied and in need of proof. In reality they have meant by design those characteristics of things which they hold to be the indications or evidences or correlatives of intelligence, and which they might have designated by such terms as order, adjustment, adaptation, fitness, progress, &c. All attempts to refute their reasoning, therefore, by a strict and literal interpretation of the phrase "Design implies a designer," must be pronounced unfair. Censure of the phrase is warranted. Rejection of the argument on account of the phrase is superficial and unjust.