Note (return) — Chapter VI

The design argument is drawn from the analogies of human experience. From the relation which human works bear to human thoughts and feelings, it infers a corresponding relation between works more or less similar, but superhuman, and superhuman thoughts and feelings. If it prove these, nobody but a metaphysician needs care whether or not it proves a mysterious substratum for them. 236 The argument from design, it seems to us, however, would have no validity if there be no external world offering marks of design. If the external world is only a mode of feeling, a series of mental states, then our notion of the Divine Existence may be only "an association of feelings"--a mode of Self. And if we have no positive knowledge of a real self as existing, and God's existence is no more "real than our own," then the Divine existence stands on a very dubious and uncertain foundation. It can have no very secure hold upon the human mind, and certainly has no claim to be regarded as a fundamental and necessary belief. That it has a very precarious hold upon the mind of Mr. Mill, is evident from the following passage in his article on "Later Speculations of A. Comte." 237 "We venture to think that a religion may exist without a belief in a God, and that a religion without a God may be, even to Christians, an instructive and profitable object of contemplation."