ena. Moreover, he has failed signally in
his _analysis_ of the Design argument, seeing that, in common with all
previous writers, he failed to observe that it is utterly impossible for
us to know the relations in which the supposed Designer stands to the
Designed,--much less to argue from the fact that the Supreme Mind, even
supposing it to exist, caused the observable products by any particular
intellectual _process_. In other words, all advocates of the Design
argument have failed to perceive that, even if we grant nature to be due
to a creating Mind, still we have no shadow of a right to conclude that
this Mind can only have exerted its creative power by means of such and
such cogitative operations. How absurd, therefore, must it be to raise
the supposed evidence of such cogitative operations into evidences of
the existence of a creating Mind! If a theist retorts that it is, after
all, of very little importance whether or not we are able to divine the
_methods_ of creation, so long as the _facts_ are there to attest that,
_in some way or other_, the observable phenomena of nature must be due
to Intelligence of some kind as their ultimate cause, then I am the
first to endorse this remark. It has always appeared to me one of the
most unaccountable things in the history of speculation that so many
competent writers can have insisted upon _Design_ as an argument for
Theism, when they must all have known perfectly well that they have no
means of ascertaining the subjective psychology of that Supreme Mind
whose existence the argument is adduced to demonstrate. The truth is,
that the argument from teleology must, and can only, rest upon the
observable _facts_ of nature, without reference to the intellectual
_processes_ by which these facts may be supposed to have been
accomplished. But, looking to the "present state of our knowledge," this
is merely to change the teleological argument in its gross Paleyian
form, into the argument from the ubiquitous operation of general laws.'

'Sec. 4. This argument was thus[10] stated in contrast with the argument
from design. 'The argument from design says, there must be a God,
because such and such an organic structure must have been due to such
and such an intellectual _process_. The argument from general laws says,
There must be a God, because such and such an organic structure must _in
some way or other have been ultimately due to_ intelligence.' Every
structure exhibits with more or