of natural selection" exclude "the agency of an intelligence in which the
image or idea of the end precedes the use of the means;" and since the
former have been understood "purpose has ceased to suggest design to
instructed people, except in cases where the agency of man is independently
probable." The maxim "L'homme propose, Dieu dispose," under this reading
means that the former has the monopoly of design, while the latter
accomplishes without designing. Man's works alone suggest design.

But it is clear to us that this monopoly is shared with certain beings of
inferior grade. Granting that quite possibly the capture of flies for food
by Dionaea and the sundews may be attributed to purpose apart from design
(if it be practicable in the last resort to maintain this now convenient
distinction), still their capture by a spider's-web, and by a swallow on
the wing, can hardly "cease to suggest design to instructed people." And
surely, in coming at his master's call, the dog fulfills his own design as
well as that of his master; and so of other actions and constructions of
brute animals.

Without doubt so acute a writer has a clear and sensible meaning; so we
conclude that he regards brutes as automata, and was thinking of design as
coextensive merely with general conceptions. Not concerning ourselves with
the difficulty he may have in drawing a line between the simpler judgments
and affections of man and those of the highest-endowed brutes, we subserve
our immediate ends by remarking that the automatic theory would seem to be
one which can least of all dispense with design, since, either in the
literal or current sense of the word, undesigned automatism is, as near as
may be, a contradiction in terms. As the automaton man constructs manifests
the designs of its maker and mover, so the more efficient automata which
man did not construct would not legitimately suggest less than human
intelligence. And so all adaptations in the animal and vegetable world