Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/306

Rh or daemons above us must be regarded as impossible. The only question to be here solved is the possibility of purely inductive proof of the existence of such higher intelligent agencies. And here, as we hold, just the ancient difficulties as to the proof of any empirical teleological theory survive, and are, in spite of all that recent writers have done, rather increased by our knowledge of the facts of evolution. Especially does evolution make the empirical hypothesis of the existence of any finite and good daemonic power, intelligently and morally working in the world, continually more and more obscure. For first, as to the intelligence of the higher powers, what the theory of evolution has done for us in this respect is simply to make us feel that we know not, and cannot yet even guess, how much what we empirically call bare mechanism can do to simulate the effects of what, in an equally empirical and blind way, men call intelligence. Therefore no empirical design-argument has longer anywhere nearly the same amount of persuasive power that it once seemed to have. The matter stands thus: An empirical design-argument might very plausibly reason that, if I find a child’s blocks arranged to make a house or to spell words, I can assume that some designing human hand has so placed them. But the inductive force of the argument rests on my previous knowledge that nothing is so apt to put blocks in that order, in this present visible world, as just a designing human hand. But if I discovered certain physical conditions that did very frequently work, and that did often so arrange blocks, then I should no longer