Let us now make a few remarks on the theological argument, or the argument from design, here sketched {78} in such broad and masterly lines. It is an argument, when taken in the gross, and in its grand outline, so striking and so convincing, that it is only by confining the eye to a few minute and unessential points that certain precise and puzzling minds have conceited themselves that they were able to blunt the edge of its force. One class of objectors, unfortunately not at all uncommon in recent times, have imagined that they have refuted Paley’s famous argument from the watch found on a waste heath, by saying that there is no analogy between a piece of human manufacture like a watch, and a living growth like a plant or an animal. Very true, so far; a growth is a growth, and a manufacture is a manufacture; the one possesses inherent divine vitality, the other no vitality at all; but what follows? Not that an animal and a plant have nothing in common, but only that they have not the principle of vitality in common; not that the animal may not be constructed on the same principles of design and adaptation on which the watch is constructed, but that the animal to the curious machinery has something superadded which we call life. The fact of the matter is, that Dr. Paley’s argument would hold equally good if the designing soul that made the supposed watch, instead of being outside in the shape of a watch-maker, had been inside, as the principle of vitality is in a plant; then we should have called the watch a plant or an animal, and the design would have spoken out from its structure as manifestly as before. There is therefore no difference, so far as design and calculation are concerned, between a cunningly constituted growth and a curiously compacted machine. Another class of objectors are fond to tell us that things are not {79} what they are by virtue of any inherent calculated type, but by a combination of complex conditions and circumstances, which in the course of millions of millions of ages work themselves happily into a consistent organism. This is just Epicurus back again in his naked absurdity, almost indeed in the same senseless phraseology; as we may see, for instance, in the following passage from the _Westminster Review_, on which in the course of my reading I accidentally stumbled:--“The positive method makes very little account of marks of intelligence; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that these incidents are a minority, and _may rank as happy coincidences_; it absorbs them in the singular conception of LAW.” Let us attempt to analyse this utterance. It is the boast of the Comtian philosophy to find intelligence in the works of Auguste Comte, but not in the works of the Architect of the universe. Let that pass. In the next place it is indicated that it is a narrow view of things which discovers DESIGN in creation; a larger view reveals LAW; and the few incidents that may seem to indicate