Note 81.1 — SOCRATES.

Let us now make a few remarks on the theological argument, or the argument from design, here sketched in such broad and masterly lines. It is an argument, when taken in the gross, and in its grand outline, so striking and so convincing, that it is only by confining the eye to a few minute and unessential points that certain precise and puzzling minds have conceited themselves that they were able to blunt the edge of its force. One class of objectors, unfortunately not at all uncommon in recent times, have imagined that they have refuted Paley’s famous argument from the watch found on a waste heath, by saying that there is no analogy between a piece of human manufacture like a watch, and a living growth like a plant or an animal. Very true, so far; a growth is a growth, and a manufacture is a manufacture; the one possesses inherent divine vitality, the other no vitality at all; but what follows? Not that an animal and a plant have nothing in common, but only that they have not the principle of vitality in common; not that the animal may not be constructed on the same principles of design and adaptation on which the watch is constructed, but that the animal to the curious machinery has something superadded which we call life. The fact of the matter is, that Dr. Paley’s argument would hold equally good if the designing soul that made the supposed watch, instead of being outside in the shape of a watch-maker, had been inside, as the principle of vitality is in a plant; then we should have called the watch a plant or an animal, and the design would have spoken out from its structure as manifestly as before. There is therefore no difference, so far as design and calculation are concerned, between a cunningly constituted growth and a curiously compacted machine. Another class of objectors are fond to tell us that things are not what they are by virtue of any inherent calculated type, but by a combination of complex conditions and circumstances, which in the course of millions of millions of ages work themselves happily into a consistent organism. This is just Epicurus back again in his naked absurdity, almost indeed in the same senseless phraseology; as we may see, for instance, in the following passage from the Westminster Review, on which in the course of my reading I accidentally stumbled:—“The positive method makes very little account of marks of intelligence; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that these incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it absorbs them in the singular conception of Law.” Let us attempt to analyse this utterance. It is the boast of the Comtian philosophy to find intelligence in the works of Auguste Comte, but not in the works of the Architect of the universe. Let that pass. In the next place it is indicated that it is a narrow view of things which discovers design in creation; a larger view reveals law; and the few incidents that may seem to indicate design are perhaps better explained by the old Epicurean method of the “fortuitous concourse of atoms.” Never was a greater amount of incoherence crammed into a short sentence. The inference which Dr. Paley drew from his watch is not in the least affected by the narrowness of the view which the inspection of a watch necessitates; nor would the striking evidence of a design in the structure of that little telescope the human eye, be diminished in the least by extending the view to the largest telescope ever made, or to the largest human body in the watch-tower of which a human eye was ever placed. The only legitimate consequence of mounting from the contemplation of an eye, merely as an eye, to its consideration as part of a large organism called the human body, would be to increase admiration by the discovery that the little design of the instrument was subservient to the large design of the body, as if, after admiring a small chamber in a vast building, and praising the cunning of the architect, we should walk through the whole suite of rooms and then discover some new beauty in the chamber having reference to the great whole of which it was a part. But instead of this our author informs us that this wider view “absorbs the original feeling of design into the singular conception of Law.” Applied to the supposed case of the small chamber in the large palace, this is flat nonsense. For the “singular conception of Law,” in this case, is just the large plan of the whole building, which, along with the small plan of each part, proceeded from the comprehensive intellect of the architect. What is Law? The reasoning in the above passage implies that it is something contrary to design, something that absorbs it, nay more, something that reduces it to the category of a “happy coincidence.” But Law is only a steady self-consistent method of operation, which explains nothing; it is only a fact; and if in this method of operation there be manifest order and purpose of producing a reasoned and consistent result, the law then becomes a manifestation of design, as in the original application of the word to the work of a lawgiver, a Solon or a Lycurgus whose laws certainly implied a calculated purpose of reform and re-organization; or, to take again the watch, the law by which this tiny worker goes, is only the single word which, describes that ordered complex of calculated movements which the design of the maker puts into play, for the purpose of marking the regular lapse of time. The discovery of a great law, therefore, in an ordered and calculated system of things, such as the world, may enlarge the field in which design is exhibited, but, so far from absorbing, can only tend to make that design more prominent. So much for Comte. But what shall we say of Darwin? If that original and ingenious investigator of nature really does mean to say that there are no original types of things in the Divine mind (I use Platonic language purposely, because it is the only language that satisfies the demands of the case), and that a rose became a lily, or a lily a rose, by some external power called “natural selection,”—I reply that I shall believe this when I see it; that a modifying influence is one thing, and a plastic force another; and that, as an able Hegelian philosopher remarks,[81.1] a selection producing not a random but a reasonable result always implies some principle of selection, and a selecting agency—that is, the Socratic designing Intellect.