But it is evident that
Professor Flint's time-honoured argument is now completely overthrown,
unless it can be proved that there is some radical error in the reasoning
whereby I have endeavoured to show that natural causes not only _may_, but
_must_, have produced existing order. The overthrow is complete, because
the very groundwork of the argument in question is knocked away; a third
possibility, of the nature of a necessity, is introduced, and therefore the
alternative is no longer between Intelligence and Fortuity, but between
Intelligence and Natural Causation. Whereas the overwhelming strength of
the argument from Order has hitherto consisted in the supposition of
Intelligence as the one and only conceivable cause of the integration of
things, my exposition in Chapter IV. has shown that such integration must
have been due, at all events in a relative or proximate sense, to a
strictly physical cause--the persistence of force and the consequent
self-evolution of natural law. And the question as to whether or not
Intelligence may not have been the absolute or ultimate cause is manifestly
a question altogether alien to the argument from Order; for if existing
order admits of being accounted for, in a relative or proximate sense, by
merely physical causes, the argument from a relative or proximate order is
not at liberty to infer or to assume the existence of any higher or more
ultimate cause.
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