It may be said
that the requisite calculations have been made for the bees by the Deity;
but, even if this assumption were true, it would be nothing to the point,
which is merely that even within the limits of the animal kingdom the
relations of intelligence to the external world are so diverse, that the
same results may be accomplished by totally different intellectual
processes. And as this example is parallel to the case on which we are
engaged in everything save the _observability_ of the relations involved,
it supplies us with the exact measure of the probability we are trying to
estimate. Hence it is evident that so long as we remain ignorant of the
element essential to the argument from design in its Paleyerian form--viz.,
knowledge or presumption of the relations subsisting between an
hypothetical Deity and his creation--so long must that argument remain, not
only unassignably weak, but incapable of being strengthened by any number
of examples similar in kind.
Sec. 25. To put the case in another way. The root fallacy in Paley's argument
consisted in reasoning from a particular to an universal. Because he knew
that design was the cause of adaptation in some cases, and because the
phenomena of life exhibited more instances of adaptation than any other
class of phenomena in nature, he pointed to these phenomena as affording an
exceptional kind of proof of the presence in nature of intelligent agency.
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