Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/256

244 preserve their species, to escape their enemies, to remove discomforts. All nature, thus examined, and particularly all animated nature, seems full of means toward ends, and those ends invariably such as a beneficent Creator might well be supposed to have in view. And while there is undeniably one great objection to his whole argument, namely, that the Creator is represented as an artificer rather than a Creator, as overcoming difficulties which stood in his way rather than as an Almighty Being fashioning things according to his will, yet the argument thus drawn from evidence of design remains exceedingly powerful, and it has always been considered a strong corroboration of the voice within which bids us believe in a God. Now, it certainly seems at first as if this argument were altogether destroyed. If animals were not made as we see them, but evolved by natural law, still more if it appear that their wonderful adaptation to their surroundings is due to the influence of those surroundings, it might seem as if we could no longer speak of design as exhibited in their various organs; the organs, we might say, grow of themselves, some suitable and some unsuitable to the life of the creatures to which they belonged, and the unsuitable have perished and the suitable have survived.

But Paley has supplied the clew to the answer. In his well-known illustration of the watch picked up on the heath by the passing traveler, he points out that the evidence of design is certainly not lessened if it be found that the watch was so constructed that, in course of time, it produced another watch like itself. He was thinking not of evolution, but of the ordinary production of each generation of animals from the preceding. But his answer can be pushed a step further, and we may with equal justice remark that we should certainly not believe it a proof that the watch had come into existence without design if we found that it produced in course of time not merely another watch but a better. It would become more marvelous than ever if we found provision thus made, not merely for the continuance of the species, but for the perpetual improvement of the species. It is essential to animal life that the animal should be adapted to its circumstances; if, besides provision for such adaptation in each generation, we find provision for still better adaptation in future generations, how can it be said that the evidences of design are diminished? Or take any separate organ, such as the eye. It is impossible not to believe, until it be disproved, that the eye was intended to see with. We can not say that light was made for the eye, because light subserves many other purposes besides that of enabling eyes to see. But that the eye was intended for light there is so strong a presumption that it can not easily be rebutted. If, indeed, it could be shown that eyes fulfilled several other functions, or that species of animals which always lived in the dark still had fully-formed eyes, then we might say that the connection between the eye of an animal and the light of heaven was accidental. But the contrary is notoriously the case—so much the case