combinations of ideas. This is absurd, and Diderot, as we have seen,
rapidly passed away from that to the real strength of the position. All
the rest of the contention against final causes would have come just as
fitly from the lips of a man with vision, as from Saunderson. The
hypothetical inference of a deity from the marvels of adaptation to be
found in the universe is unjustified, among other reasons, because it
ignores or leaves unexplained the marvels of mis-adaptation in the
universe. It makes absolute through eternity a hypothesis which can at
its best only be true relatively--not merely to the number of our
senses, but--to a few partially chosen phenomena of our own little day.
It explains a few striking facts; it leaves wholly unexplained a far
greater number of equally striking facts, even if it be not directly
contradicted by them. It is the invention of an imaginary agency to
account for the scanty successes of creation, and an attribution to that
agency of the kind of motives that might have animated a benevolent
European living in the eighteenth century. It leaves wholly unaccounted
for the prodigious host of monstrous or imperfect organisms, and the
appalling law of merciless and incessant destruction.

To us this is the familiar discussion of the day. But let us return to
the starting-point of this chapter. In France a hundred and twenty years
ago it was the first opening of a decisive breach in the walls that had
sheltered the men of Western Europe against outer desolation for some
fifteen centuries or more. The completeness of Catholicism, as a
self-containing system of life and thought, is now harder for
Protestants or Sceptics to realise, than any other fact in the whole
history of human society. Catholicism was not only an institution, nor
only a religious faith; it was also a philosophy and a systematised
theory of the universe. The Church during its best age directed the
moral relations of individual men, and attempted, more or less