These illustrations make it clear that the evidence of design from structure and adaptation is furnished complete by the individual animal or plant itself, and that our knowledge or our ignorance of the history of its formation or mode of production adds nothing to it and takes nothing away.  We infer design from certain arrangements and results; and we have no other way of ascertaining it.  Testimony, unless infallible, cannot prove it, and is out of the question here.  Testimony is not the appropriate proof of design:  adaptation to purpose is.  Some arrangements in Nature appear to be contrivances, but may leave us in doubt.  Many others, of which the eye and the hand are notable examples, compel belief with a force not appreciably short of demonstration.  Clearly to settle that these must have been designed goes far towards proving that other organs and other seemingly less explicit adaptations in Nature must also have been designed, and clinches our belief, from manifold considerations, that all Nature is a preconcerted arrangement, a manifested design.  A strange contradiction would it be to insist that the shape and markings of certain rude pieces of flint, lately found in drift deposits, prove design, but that nicer and thousand-fold more complex adaptations to use in animals and vegetables do not a fortiori argue design.

We could not affirm that the arguments for design in Nature are conclusive to all minds.  But we may insist, upon grounds already intimated, that whatever they were good for before Darwin’s book appeared, they are good for now.  To our minds the argument from design always appeared conclusive of the being and continued operation of an intelligent First Cause, the Ordainer of Nature; and we do not see that the grounds of such belief would be disturbed or shifted by the adoption of Darwin’s hypothesis.  We are not blind to the philosophical difficulties which the thorough-going implication of design in Nature has to encounter, nor is it our vocation to obviate them.  It suffices us to know that they are not new nor peculiar difficulties,—­that, as Darwin’s theory and our reasonings upon it did not raise these perturbing spirits, they are not bound to lay them.  Meanwhile, that the doctrine of design encounters the very same difficulties in the material that it does in the moral world is just what ought to be expected.

So the issue between the skeptic and the theist is only the old one, long ago argued out,—­namely, whether organic Nature is a result of design or of chance.  Variation and natural selection open no third alternative; they concern only the question, How the results, whether fortuitous or designed, may have been brought about.  Organic Nature abounds with unmistakable and irresistible indications of design, and, being a connected and consistent system, this evidence carried the implication of design throughout the whole.  On the other hand, chance carries no probabilities with it, can never be developed into a consistent system; but, when applied to the explanation of orderly or beneficial results, heaps up improbabilities at every step beyond all computation.  To us, a fortuitous Cosmos is simply inconceivable.  The alternative is a designed Cosmos.