standing of Materialism) how far even the genuine test of
inconceivability ought to be allowed to make against an inference which
there is a body of scientific evidence to substantiate, we went on to
the second objection against this fundamental position of metaphysical
teleology. This objection, it will be remembered, was, that it is as
impossible to conceive of cosmic harmony as an effect of Mind [i.e. Mind
being what we know it in experience to be], as it is to conceive of it
as an effect of mindless evolution. The argument from inconceivability,
therefore, admits of being turned with quite as terrible an effect on
Theism, as it can possibly be made to exert on Atheism.

'Hence this more refined form of teleology which we are considering, and
which we saw to be the last of the possible arguments in favour of
Theism, is met on its own ground by a very crushing opposition: by its
metaphysical character it has escaped the opposition of physical
science, only to encounter a new opposition in the region of pure
psychology to which it fled. As a conclusion to our whole inquiry,
therefore, it devolved on us to determine the relative magnitudes of
these opposing forces. And in doing this we first observed that, if the
supporters of metaphysical teleology objected _à priori_ to the method
whereby the genesis of natural law was deduced from the datum of the
persistence of force, in that this method involved an unrestricted use
of illegitimate symbolic conceptions; then it is no less open to an
atheist to object _à priori_ to the method whereby a directing Mind was
inferred from the datum of cosmic harmony, in that this method involved
the postulation of an unknowable cause,--and this of a character which
the whole history of human thought has proved the human mind to exhibit
an overweening tendency to postulate as the cause of natural phenomena.
On these grounds, therefore, I concluded that, so far as their
respective standing _à priori_ is concerned, both theories may be