The fact is expressed by
such writers in various ways,--_e.g._, that it would be presumptuous in man
to expect complete conformity in all cases; that the counsels of God are
past finding out; that his ways are not as our ways, and so on. Observing
only, as before, that in thus ignoring adverse cases natural theologians
are guilty of an unfair eclecticism, it is evident that all such
expressions concede the fact, that even in those provinces of nature where
the evidence of superhuman intelligence appears most plain, the resemblance
of its apparent products to those of human intelligence consists in a
general approximation of method rather than in any precise similarity of
particulars: the likeness is generic rather than specific.
Now this is exactly what we should expect to be the case, if the similarity
in question be due to the cause which the present section endeavours to set
forth. If all natural laws are self-evolved, and if human intelligence is
but a subjective photograph of certain among their interrelations, it seems
but natural that when this photograph compares itself with the whole
external world from parts of which it was taken, its subjective lights and
shadows should be found to correspond with some of the objective lights and
shadows much more perfectly than with others. Still there would doubtless
be sufficient general conformity to lead the thinking photograph to
conclude that the great world of objective reality, instead of being the
_cause_ of such conformity as exists, was itself the _effect_ of some
common cause,--that it too was of the nature of a picture.
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