Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/200

 182 P A L P A L diocese ; and the bishop of Durham conferred upon him the rectory of Bishop- Wearmouth, worth 1200 a year. Paley transferred his household to Bishop-Wearmouth in 1795. His wife, the mother of eight children, had died four years before, and in the end of 1795 Paley married a second time. During the remainder of his life his time was divided between Bishop- Wearmouth and Lincoln. In 1800 he was attacked by the disease of the kidneys which ultimately carried him off. It was in the intervals of comparative health and ease that remained to him that his last, and in some respects his most remarkable, work was produced, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). He endeavoured, as he says in dedicating the book to the bishop of Durham, to repair in the study his deficiencies in the church. He died on the 25th May 1805. In the dedication just referred to, Paley claims a systematic unity for his works. It is true that &quot; they have been written in an order the very reverse of that in which they ought to be read &quot; ; nevertheless the Natural Theology forms &quot; the completion of a regular and comprehensive design.&quot; The truth of this will be apparent if it is considered that the Moral and Political Philo sophy admittedly embodies two presuppositions (1) that &quot;God Almighty wills and wishes the happiness of His creatures,&quot; and (2) that adequate motives must be supplied to virtue by a system of future rewards and punishments. Now the second presupposition depends, according to Paley, on the credibility of the Christian religion (which he treats almost exclusively as the revelation of these &quot; new sanctions &quot; of morality). The Evidences and the Horse, Paulina were intended as a demonstration of this credi bility. The argument of these books, however, depends in turn upon the assumption of a benevolent Creator desirous of com municating with His creatures for their good ; and the Natural Theology, by applying the argument from design to prove the existence of such a Deity, becomes the foundation of the argu mentative edifice. The sense of unity in the structure is increased to a reader of the present day by the uniformity of the point of view from which the world is regarded throughout. Paley has popularized for 19th-century use the Deistic conception of the universe and the divine economy which was common ground last century both to the assailants and the defenders of orthodox Christianity. In his Natural Theology Paley has adapted with consummate skill the argument which Ray (1691) and Derham (1711) and Nieuwentyt 1 (1730) had already made familiar to Englishmen. &quot;For my part,&quot; he says, &quot; I take my stand in human anatomy&quot; ; and what he everywhere insists upon is &quot; the necessity, in each particular case, of an intelligent designing mind for the contriving and determining of the. forms which organized bodies bear.&quot; This is the whole argument, and the book consists of a mass of .well- chosen instances marshalled in support of it. But by placing Paley s facts in a new light, the theory of evolution has deprived his argument of its force, so far as it applies the idea of special contrivance to individual organs or to species. Paley s idea of contrivance is only applicable if we suppose a highly developed organism to be dropped suddenly into foreign surroundings. But the relation of an organism to its environment is not of this external nature, and the adaptation of the one to the other must be regarded as the result of a long process of interaction in the past history of the species. In thus substituting the operation of general laws for Paley s continual invocation of a supernatural cause, evolution passes no judgment on the question of the ultimate dependence of these laws upon intelligence ; but it evidently alters profoundly our general conception of the relation of that intelligence to the world. The Evidences of Christianity is mainly a condensation of Bishop Douglas s Criterion and Lardner s Credibility of the Gospel History. But the task is so judiciously performed that it would probably be difficult to get a more effective statement of the external evidences of Christianity than Paley has here presented. The general position, &quot;however, that the action of the first preachers of Christianity was due &quot; solely &quot; to their belief in the occurrence of 1 Nieuwentyt (1654-1718) was a Dutch disciple of Descartes, whose work, Regt yclmtyk der weereld leschovinye, published in 1716, was translated into English in 1730 under the title of The Religious Philosopher. A charge of wholesale plagiarism from this book was brought against Paley in the AtJienseum for 1848. Paley refers several times to Nieuwentyt, who uses the famous illustration of the watch. But the illustration is not peculiar to Nieuwentyt, and had been appropriated by many others before Paley. In the case of a writer whose chief merit is the way in which he has worked up existing material, a general charge of plagiarism is almost irrelevant. certain miraculous events is on the same level as the view that &quot; the proper business of a revelation &quot; is to certify future rewards and punishments. It betrays a defective analysis of the religious consciousness. For the rest, his idea of revolution depends upon the same mechanical conception of the relation of God to the world which dominates his Natural Theology ; and he seeks to prove the divine origin of Christianity by isolating it from the general history of mankind, whereas later writers find their chief argument in the continuity of the process of revelation. For the place of Paley s theological utilitarianism in the history of ethical speculation in England, see ETHICS. The face of the world has changed so greatly since Paley s day that we are apt to do less than justice to his undoubted merits. He is nowhere original, and nowhere profound, but he justly claims to be &quot;something more than a mere compiler.&quot; His strong reasoning power, his faculty of clear arrangement and forcible statement, place him in the iirst rank of expositors and advocates. He masses his arguments, it has been said, with a general s eye. His style is perfectly perspicuous, and its &quot; strong home-touch &quot; compensates for what is lacking in elasticity and grace. Paley s avoidance of ultimate speculative questions commended him to his own generation, and enabled him to give full scope to the shrewd practical understanding in which his strength lay. He displays little or no spirituality of feeling ; but this is a matter in which one age is apt to misjudge another, and Paley was at least practi cally benevolent and conscientiously attentive to his parish duties. The active part he took in advocating the abolition of the slave- trade is evidence of a wider power of sympathy. His unconquerable cheerfulness becomes itself almost religious in the last chapters of the Natural Theology, when we consider the circumstances in which they were composed. The chapter on the goodness of the Deity is more touched with feeling than any other part of his writings, and impresses the reader with respect for his essential goodness of heart. (A. SE.) PALGHAT, a town in Malabar district, Madras, India, situated in the gap or pass of the same name in the Western Ghats, in 10 45 49&quot; N. lat. and 76 41 48&quot; E. long., 74 miles south-east of Beypur, with a population in 1881 of 36,339. Being the key to Travancore and Malabar from the east, it was formerly of considerable strategic importance. The fort fell for the first time into British hands in 1768, and subsequently formed the basis of many of the operations against Tippoo, which terminated in the storming of Seringapatam. It still stands, but is no longer garrisoned. PalghAt is a busy entrepot for the exchange of produce between Malabar and the upland country, and is a station on the Madras railway. The easy ascent by the Palghdt Pass, formerly covered with teak forests, supplies the great route from the south-west coast of India to the interior. PALGRAVE, SIR FRANCIS (1788-1861), historian, was born in London in July 1788, the son of Meyer Cohen, a Jew, and a wealthy member of the stock exchange. He was privately educated, and such was his capacity for languages that at the age of eight he translated the Latin version of the Frogs and Mice into French, which his father published in 1797 with a short preface. On account of the failure of his father s fortunes in 1803 he was articled as clerk to a firm of solicitors, with whom he remained till 1822, acting for some years as their managing clerk, after which he took chambers in King s Bench Walk, Temple, and was employed under the record commission. On his marriage in 1823 he obtained the royal permission to change his name from Cohen to Palgrave, the maiden name of his wife s mother. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1827, and soon acquired a good practice in pedigree cases in the House of Lords. From an early period of his life he had devoted much attention to literary and antiquarian studies. In 1818 he edited a collection of Anglo-Norman chansons, and previous to his call to the bar contributed largely to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. In 1831 he published the History of England, in the Family Library series, and in 1832 he brought out The Rise and Pi-ogress of the English Commonwealth, and Observations on the Principles of Neiv Municipal Corpora tions. The same year he received the honour of knight-