founding any conclusions as to its nature upon analogies furnished by the human mind.  The theory ceases to be anthropomorphic:  it ceases to be even ‘anthropopsychic’:  it is affiliated with the conception of mind only in virtue of the one fact that it serves to give the best provisional account of the order of Nature, by supposing an infinite extension of some of the faculties of the human mind, with a concurrent obliteration of all the essential conditions under which alone these faculties are known to exist.  Obviously of such a Mind as this no predication is logically possible.  If such a Mind exists, it is not conceivable as existing, and we are precluded from assigning to it any attributes.

Thus much on general grounds.  Descending now to matters of more detail, let us assume with the natural theologians that such a Mind does exist, that it so far resembles the human mind as to be a conscious, personal intelligence, and that the care of such a Mind is over all its works.  Even upon the grounds of this supposition we meet with a number of large and general facts which indicate that this Mind ought still to be regarded as apparently very unlike its ‘image’ in the mind of man.  I will not here dwell upon the argument of seeming waste and purposeless action in Nature, because I think that this may be fairly met by the ulterior argument already drawn from Nature as a whole—­viz. that as a whole, Nature is a cosmos, and therefore that what to us appears wasteful and purposeless in matters of detail may not be so in relation to the scheme of things as a whole.  But I am doubtful whether this ulterior argument can fairly be adduced to meet the apparent absence in Nature of that which in man we term morality.  For in the human mind the sense of right and wrong—­with all its accompanying or constituting emotions of love, sympathy, justice, &c.—­is so important a factor, that however greatly we may imagine the intellectual side of the human mind to be extended, we can scarcely imagine that the moral side could ever become so apparently eclipsed as to end in the authorship of such a work as we find in terrestrial nature.  It is useless to hide our eyes to the state of matters which meets us here.  Most of the instances of special design which are relied upon by the natural theologian to prove the intelligent nature of the First Cause, have as their end or object the infliction of painful death or the escape from remorseless enemies; and so far the argument in favour of the intelligent nature of the First Cause is an argument against its morality.  Again, even if we quit the narrower basis on which teleological argument has rested in the past, and stand that argument upon the broader ground of Nature as a whole, it scarcely becomes less incompatible with any inference to the morality of that Cause, seeing that the facts to which I have alluded are not merely occasional and, as it were, outweighed by contrary facts of a more general kind, but manifestly constitute the leading feature of the scheme of organic nature as a whole:  or, if this were held to be questionable, it could only follow that we are not entitled to infer that there is any such scheme at all.