en
though the modes of procedure involved in these admissions were not
quite impossible or inconceivable, belief in them would, I repeat, be
palpably irrational, and that almost to the last degree. The nearest
approach to a reason that can be imagined for it is the _Credo quia
incredibile est_ to which philosophers in despair have occasionally been
known to resort. _Dudum in scholis audiveram_, says Descartes, _nihil
tam absurde dici posse quod non dicatur ab aliquo Philosophorum_. In his
early college days he had heard that nothing so absurd can possibly be
said, but that some philosopher or other may say it. Such words are too
hard for me. I make as yet no charges of absurdity, contenting myself
for the moment with saying that no notion can be too unscientific to be
adopted by those scientific men who, gratuitously running counter to the
strongest possible presumption, set the science of probabilities so
utterly at naught as to adopt as reality an hypothesis the chances
against which are but one single iota short of infinite.

What, however, is unequivocally absurd, is a certain notion which I
hinted would be found to be inevitably consequent on the foregoing
premisses, and whose self-evident falsity carries with it condemnation
of the premisses. To say that the creative agency denominated Nature, or
by whatever other name known, neither had any ends in view when
originally adopting certain sequences of action, and originally
fabricating innumerable organisms exactly suitable for the performance,
in concert with those sequences, of innumerable useful functions; nor,
although ever since repeating the sequences, and maintaining or
reproducing the organisms, has so done with any reference to the
purposes which the sequences and organisms serve, is equivalent to
saying that the agency in question is not even aware that any purposes
are served. He who planted the eye doth not then see. He who fashioned
the ear doth not hear. He who teacheth man knowledge doth not, it seems,
know. Yet what, according to this, creative agency, whether God or
Nature, Creator or Creatress, can not perceive, the creature can. Even
an ass knows that thistles are good to eat, and that certain movements
of his tongue and larynx will result in a bray; while man not only daily
discovers fresh uses for things, but imagines that if he had had the
fashioning of them, he might have materially increased their utility;
King Alfonso of Castile, for instanc