Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/844

822 give what it does not possess, that the greater is contained in the less, the superior in the inferior, the whole in a part."

Still another difficulty for the opponents of teleology arises from their inability to understand the purpose of many things in Nature. This, however, far from being an objection to the argument from design, should only make one more conscious of his ignorance, and of the limitation of human knowledge. If we can discern manifest evidence of design—and this no reasonable man can deny—in even a few things, and if, of the manifold purposes exhibited in any given object, we can discover but one, we have evidence which is quite sufficient for the validity of the design-argument, and quite sufficient, likewise, to meet all the requirements of the teleologist.

It is, indeed, passing strange that those who are always so prompt to deny the existence of purpose in Nature, when there is question of teleology, or when theological implications are suspected, are the very first to insist on the evidence of mind and purpose when in their own case it is demanded by the exigencies of argument or discovery, and especially when it is demanded by the exigencies of special pleading.

A case in point is the argument for the great antiquity of man based on the existence of arrowheads and flint flakes, found in certain deposits whose age is indisputable. Contrary to the traditional view regarding the recent advent of man on earth, we have anti-teleologists who claim as the date of the appearance of our race one which carries us back tens, yea, hundreds of thousands of years. And on what do they base their argument? On evidences of mind and purpose. The arrowheads and flint flakes, they declare, and rightly, could not have been fashioned by chance; they could not have been formed by even the highest representatives of the brute creation. They indicate intelligence, design. They must, therefore, have been produced by man. Man, therefore, must have existed long prior to the period usually assigned as the date of his apparition on our planet.

Now, while no one can object to the argument, as thus presented, we find it strangely inconsistent that its validity should be questioned where the evidence of mind and purpose is far more striking—to wit, in the multifarious phenomena of the universe, all of which betoken far more than human intelligence and power. I shall here limit myself to only a single but a most telling illustration—the preparation of the world as the dwelling place of man. The storage of coal as fuel, the introduction of certain plants and animals shortly before the advent of our species, and in strict correlation with it—plants which were almost indispensable as articles of food, and the appearance of animals, such as the sheep, cow, and horse, which