else whatsoever.

'§ 3. With regard to the argument from Design, it was observed that
Mill's presentation of it [in his _Essay on Theism_] is merely a
resuscitation of the argument as presented by Paley, Bell, and Chalmers.
And indeed we saw that the first-named writer treated this whole subject
with a feebleness and inaccuracy very surprising in him; for while he
has failed to assign anything like due weight to the inductive evidence
of organic evolution, he did not hesitate to rush into a supernatural
explanation of biological phenomena. 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