herbivorous tribes. But this is not the only use which they subserve. They are actively benevolent. They save the herbivorous invalid considerable pain. Ironically eulogising this "nice economy in Heaven," Blanco White argues: "By creating the carnivorous tribes to eat up the herbivorous, the aggregate of happiness thus realised would be greater than the sum which would have been realised if the herbivorous tribes had been left to replenish the earth without this providential device for limiting their numbers. For by giving to these voracious beings a very great delight connected with digestion, it may be demonstrated that the enjoyments of a sheep up to the time. of being devoured, plus the enjoyments of the devourer, minus the sufferings of the devoured, are in the aggregate greater than those of the sheep had he lived double the time and then died a natural death."1 The plea that the existence of these destructive animals is justified by their supposed commission to relieve pain recalls to the satirical critic an obsolete custom in Spain. "In many country villages there were women called dispensadoras―i.e., those who put out of pain-whose office was, when any one had a long agony, to approach the bed under some pretence, and despatch him by suffocation." It would seem that the carnivorous tribes are the dispensadoras to the herbivorous. But, unfortunately for the argument, these amiable relievers of pain do not confine their attentions to the sickly, but "generally attack their victims in the fulness of health 1 Blanco White, in The Christian Teacher, vol. v.

and enjoyment."

The "benevolent contrivances" for

increasing the aggregate of enjoyment or diminishing the sum of pain are hardly such as a judicious teleologist would select as specimens of the wisdom, power, or goodness of an Infinite Creator.

CHAPTER VI.

DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER OF DESIGN.

BUT all combinations, it is conceded, do not originate in Intelligence. Casual resemblances, and even undeniable utilities, are not accepted by the more thoughtful theist as indications of the existence of a creative or sustaining Providence. The adduced resemblances, to carry any weight with them, must be of a special and profound order, not merely superficial resemblances. Service, accommodation, utility, congruity may exist, though unaccompanied by any convincing, or even any plausible evidence of design. To supply ground for a valid argument, the resemblance in nature to works of human intelligence must possess a marked character, a definite and arresting idiosyncrasy. The distinctive test, according to Mr. Mill, is to be found in the fact that all the parts of an organism conspire to an end. This scientific character raises. the argument from one of mere analogy to the rank of a true induction.1

For the purpose of exhibiting the real value of the argument, Mill abandons the survey of the world as an orderly whole, and selects a particular and conspicuously impressive case, the structure of the eye;

1 Three Essays, pp. 168-175.

64

DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER OF DESIGN.

premising that, though of the four inductive methods the method of agreement, under which the present argument falls, is logically the feeblest, yet the particular case he proposes to consider is a specifically strong one. We will therefore more closely examine this representative instance.

CHAPTER VII.

THE EYE.

IN the eye the grand requisite of the master-logician is present. The structural details conspire to a definite end. The parts of which the eye is composed, and the various collocations which make up the arrangement of those parts, possess a general family likeness. They all similarly contribute to one remarkable endsight. The eye, as a particular combination of organic elements, had a commencement in time. This combination, then, must have been effected by a cause or causes. As the hypothesis of casual concurrence is precluded by the number of concordant circumstances, the canons of induction warrant the inference that the agent which brought about this combination was some cause common to all; and as they agree in one signal property, that of producing sight, we are led to infer the existence of some causal connection between the collocating cause and the fact of vision. Sight is thus the final cause of the construction of the particular organ which we call an eye. The efficient cause is not sight itself, but an antecedent idea of sight; and an antecedent idea of sight implies the existence of an Intelligent Will.