design are perhaps better explained by the old Epicurean method of the “fortuitous concourse of atoms.” Never was a greater amount of incoherence crammed into a short sentence. The inference which Dr. Paley drew from his watch is not in the least affected by the narrowness of the view which the inspection of a watch necessitates; nor would the striking evidence of a design in the structure of that little telescope the human eye, be diminished in the least by extending the view to the largest telescope ever made, or to the largest human body in the watch-tower of which a human eye was ever placed. The only legitimate consequence of {80} mounting from the contemplation of an eye, merely as an eye, to its consideration as part of a large organism called the human body, would be to increase admiration by the discovery that the little design of the instrument was subservient to the large design of the body, as if, after admiring a small chamber in a vast building, and praising the cunning of the architect, we should walk through the whole suite of rooms and then discover some new beauty in the chamber having reference to the great whole of which it was a part. But instead of this our author informs us that this wider view “absorbs the original feeling of design into the singular conception of LAW.” Applied to the supposed case of the small chamber in the large palace, this is flat nonsense. For the “singular conception of LAW,” in this case, is just the large plan of the whole building, which, along with the small plan of each part, proceeded from the comprehensive intellect of the architect. What is LAW? The reasoning in the above passage implies that it is something contrary to design, something that absorbs it, nay more, something that reduces it to the category of a “happy coincidence.” But Law is only a steady self-consistent method of operation, which explains nothing; it is only a fact; and if in this method of operation there be manifest order and purpose of producing a reasoned and consistent result, the law then becomes a manifestation of design, as in the original application of the word to the work of a lawgiver, a Solon or a Lycurgus whose laws certainly implied a calculated purpose of reform and re-organization; or, to take again the watch, the law by which this tiny worker goes, is only the single word which, describes that {81} ordered complex of calculated movements which the design of the maker puts into play, for the purpose of marking the regular lapse of time. The discovery of a great law, therefore, in an ordered and calculated system of things, such as the world, may enlarge the field in which design is exhibited, but, so far from absorbing, can only tend to make that design more prominent. So much for Comte. But what shall we say of Darwin? If that original and ingenious investigator of nature really does mean to say that there are no original types of things in the Divine mind (I use Platonic