erations which we cannot afford to overlook. In
particular, I reflect that, as a matter of fact, the theistic theory is
born of highly suspicious parentage,--that Fetichism, or the crudest form
of the theory of personal agency in external nature, admits of being easily
traced to the laws of a primitive psychology; that the step from this to
Polytheism is easy; and that the step from this to Monotheism is necessary.
If it is objected to this view that it does not follow that because some
theories of personal agency have proved themselves false, therefore all
such theories must be so--I answer, Unquestionably not; but the above
considerations are not adduced in order to _negative_ the theistic theory:
they are merely adduced to show that the human mind has hitherto
undoubtedly exhibited an undue and a vicious tendency to interpret the
objective processes of nature in terms of its own subjective processes; and
as we can see quite well that the current theory of personal agency in
nature, whether or not true, is a necessary outcome of intellectual
evolution, I think that the fact of so abundant an historical analogy ought
to be allowed to lend a certain degree of antecedent suspicion to this
theory--although, of course, the suspicion is of a kind which would admit
of immediate destruction before any satisfactory positive evidence in
favour of the theory.[30]

'But what is 'the satisfactory positive evidence' that is offered me?
Nothing, save an alleged subjective incapacity on the part of my opponent
adequately to conceive of the fact of cosmic harmony as due to physical
causation alone. Now I have already commented on the weakness of his
position; but as my opponent will doubtless resort to the consideration
that inconceivability of an opposite is, after all, the best criterion of
truth which at any given stage of intellectual evolution is available, I
will now conclude my overthrow by pointing out that, even if we take the
argument from teleology in its widest possible sense--the argument, I mean,
from the general order and beauty of nature, as well as the gross
constituent part of it from design--even taking this argument in its widest
sense and upon its own ground (which ground, I presume, it is now
sufficiently obvious _can_ only be that of the inconceivability of its
negation), I will conclude my examination of this argument by showing that
it is quite as inconceivable to predicate cosmic harmony an effect of
Intellige