’"The fair order of Nature is only acquired by a wholesale waste and sacrifice.”  Granted.  But if the “wholesale waste and sacrifice,” as antecedent, leads to a “fair order of Nature” as its consequent, how can it be said that the “wholesale waste and sacrifice” has been a failure?  Or how can it be said that, in point of fact, there has been a waste, or has been a sacrifice?  Clearly such things can only be said when our point of view is restricted to the means (i.e. the wholesale destruction of the less fit); not when we extend our view to what, even within the limits of human observation, is unquestionably the end (i.e. the causal result in an ever improving world of types).  A candidate who is plucked in a Civil Service examination because he happens to be one of the less fitted to pass, is no doubt an instance of failure so far as his own career is concerned; but it does not therefore follow that the system of examination is a failure in its final end of securing the best men for the Civil Service.  And the fact that the general outcome of all the individual failures in Nature is that of securing what Mr. Alexander calls “the fair order of Nature,” is assuredly evidence that the modus operandi has not been a failure in relation to what, if there be any Design in Nature at all, must be regarded as the higher purpose of such Design.  Therefore, cases of individual or otherwise relative failure cannot be quoted as evidence against the hypothesis of there being such Design.  The fact that the general system of natural causation has for its eventual result “a fair order of Nature,” cannot of itself be a fact inimical to the hypothesis of Design in Nature, even though it be true that such causation entails the continual elimination of the less efficient types.

’To the best of my judgement, then, this argument from failure, random trial, blind blundering, or in whatever other terminology the argument may be presented, is only valid as against the theory of what Mr. Alexander alludes to as a “Carpenter-God,” i.e. that if there be Design in Nature at all, it must everywhere be special Design; so that the evidence of it may as well be tested by any given minute fragment of Nature—­such as one individual organism or class of organisms—­as by having regard to the whole Cosmos.  The evidence of Design in this sense I fully allow has been totally destroyed by the proof of natural selection.  But such destruction has only brought into clearer relief the much larger question that rises behind, viz. as before phrased, Is there anything about the method of natural causation, considered as a whole, that is inimical to the theory of Design in Nature, considered as a whole?’

It is true that this argument does not bear directly upon the character of the God whose ‘design’ Nature exhibits:  but indirectly it does[33].  For instance, such an argument as that found above (on p. 79:  ‘we see a rabbit, &c.’) seems to be only valid on the postulate here described as that of the ‘Carpenter-God.’