an hyperbole to indicate an idea of
multitude to which it is not in the power of words to give adequate
expression, it might be said that while the chances against Nature's
habitual action being _unintentional_, or the result as it were of mere
fidgettiness or restlessness, are an indefinite multiple of infinity,
the chances against its being _purposeless_ and _undesigned_, without
view to end or object, is the same multiple doubled.

Still, in order to give the solitary and infinitesimal chance on the
other side its full due, let us confess it to be as yet not quite
conclusively demonstrated that the actual order of inorganic, and the
actual constitution of organic, nature are results of uninterrupted
repetition of one and the same purposeless volition, and of the same
purely fortuitous concourses of atoms. Let us admit it to be not
absolutely impossible, not utterly inconceivable, that vegetable and
animal organisms were not contrived such as they are with any view to
their becoming habitations of vegetable and animal life, but that having
been accidentally discovered to be fit to be lived in, they have been
taken possession of by life and inhabited accordingly; that, similarly,
the wondrously complex and varied mechanisms of which most organisms are
composed were not made to be used, but are used because certain uses
have been accidentally discovered for them--the eye, for instance, to
take one example out of myriads not less remarkable, not having been
meant to be seen with, but being employed for seeing because, by a happy
coincidence, the particles composing it have got to be collocated in
such wise that a picture of whatever is opposite to it is formed upon
the retina, and is thence by a nervous concatenation transmitted to the
brain. Although, if the most consummate skill, in comparison with which
that displayed in the fabrication of Mr. Newall's telescope were
downright clumsiness, had striven to devise a seeing apparatus, capable
of exact self-adjustment to all degrees of light, all gradations of
distance, all varieties of refrangibility, it could not have adopted a
contrivance more exquisitely ingenious, or evincing more minutely
accurate knowledge of the most secret laws of optics, than the mechanism
of the eye apparently betokens, let it still be admitted to be not quite
beyond the bounds of possibility, that not skill but the blindest and
densest ignorance may have presided over the whole operation. But ev