distance, is conceived to possess a sixth sense.] "Do we consider the
deficiency of this sixth sense in man as the slightest evidence against
design? Should we be less apt to infer creative wisdom if we had only four
senses instead of five, or three instead of four? No, the case would stand
precisely as it does now. We value our senses simply because we have them,
and because our conception of life as we desire it is drawn from them. But
to reason from such value to the origin of our endowment, to argue that our
senses must have been given to us by a deity because we prize them, is
evidently to move round and round in a vicious circle.

"The same rejoinder is easily applicable to the argument from beauty, which
indeed is only a particular aspect of the argument from utility. It is
certainly improbable that a random daubing of colors on a canvas will
produce a tolerable painting, even should the experiment be continued for
thousands of years. Our conception of beauty being given, it is utterly
improbable that chance should select, out of the infinity of combinations
which form and color may afford, the precise combination which that
conception will approve. But the universe is not posterior to our sense of
beauty, but antecedent to it: our sense of beauty grows out of what we see;
and hence the conformance of our world to our aesthetical conceptions is
evidence, not of the world's origin, but of our own."


We are accustomed to hear design doubted on account of certain failures of
provision, waste of resources, or functionless condition of organs; but it
is refreshingly new to have the very harmony itself of man with his
surroundings, and the completeness of provision for his wants and desires,
brought up as a refutation of the validity of the argument for design. It
is hard, indeed, if man must be out of harmony with Nature in order to
judge anything respecting it, or his relations with it; if he must have