which irresistibly suggest purpose (in the sense now accepted) would also
suggest design, and, under the law of parsimony, claim to be thus
interpreted, unless some other hypothesis will better account for the
facts. We will consider, presently, if any other does so.

We here claim only that some beings other than men design, and that the
adaptations of means to ends in the structure of animals and plants, in so
far as they carry the marks of purpose, carry also the implication of
having been designed. Also, that the idea or hypothesis of a designing
mind, as the author of Nature--however we came by it--having possession of
the field, and being one which man, himself a designer, seemingly must
needs form, cannot be rivaled except by some other equally adequate for
explanation, or displaced except by showing the illegitimacy of the
inference. As to the latter, is the common apprehension and sense of
mankind in this regard well grounded? Can we rightly reason from our own
intelligence and powers to a higher or a supreme intelligence ordering and
shaping the system of Nature?

A very able and ingenious writer upon "The Evidences of Design in Nature,"
in the Westminster Review for July, 1875, maintains the negative. His
article may be taken as the argument in support of the position assumed by
"P.C.W.," in the Contemporary Review above cited. It opens with the
admission that the orthodox view is the most simple and apparently
convincing, has had for centuries the unhesitating assent of an immense
majority of thinkers, and that the latest master-writer upon the subject
disposed to reject it, namely, Mill, comes to the conclusion that, "in the
present state of our knowledge, the adaptations in Nature afford a large
balance of probability in favor of creation by intelligence." It proceeds
to attack not so much the evidence in favor of design as the foundation
upon which the whole doctrine rests, and closes with the prediction that