How absurd, therefore, must it be to raise the
supposed evidence of such cogitative operations into evidences of the
existence of a creating Mind! If a theist retorts that it is, after all, of
very little importance whether or not we are able to divine the _methods_
of creation, so long as the _facts_ are there to attest that, _in some way
or other_, the observable phenomena of nature must be due to Intelligence
of some kind as their ultimate cause, then I am the first to endorse this
remark. It has always appeared to me one of the most unaccountable things
in the history of speculation that so many competent writers can have
insisted upon _Design_ as an argument for Theism, when they must all have
known perfectly well that they have no means of ascertaining the subjective
psychology of that Supreme Mind whose existence the argument is adduced to
demonstrate. The truth is, that the argument from teleology must, and can
only, rest upon the observable _facts_ of nature, without reference to the
intellectual _processes_ by which these facts may be supposed to have been
accomplished. But, looking to the "present state of our knowledge," this is
merely to change the teleological argument from its gross Paleyerian form,
into the argument from the ubiquitous operation of general laws. And we saw
that this transformation is now a rational necessity. How far the great
principle of natural selection may have been instrumental in the evolution
of organic forms, is not here, as Mill erroneously imagined, the question;
the question is simply as to whether we are to accept the theory of special
creation or the theory of organic evolution.
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