’Sec. 3.  With regard to the argument from Design, it was observed that Mill’s presentation of it [in his Essay on Theism] is merely a resuscitation of the argument as presented by Paley, Bell, and Chalmers.  And indeed we saw that the first-named writer treated this whole subject with a feebleness and inaccuracy very surprising in him; for while he has failed to assign anything like due weight to the inductive evidence of organic evolution, he did not hesitate to rush into a supernatural explanation of biological phenomena.  Moreover, he has failed signally in his analysis of the Design argument, seeing that, in common with all previous writers, he failed to observe that it is utterly impossible for us to know the relations in which the supposed Designer stands to the Designed,—­much less to argue from the fact that the Supreme Mind, even supposing it to exist, caused the observable products by any particular intellectual process.  In other words, all advocates of the Design argument have failed to perceive that, even if we grant nature to be due to a creating Mind, still we have no shadow of a right to conclude that this Mind can only have exerted its creative power by means of such and such cogitative operations.  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 in its gross Paleyian form, into the argument from the ubiquitous operation of general laws.’

’Sec. 4.  This argument was thus[10] stated in contrast with the argument from design.  ’The argument from design says, there must be a God, because such and such an organic structure must have been due to such and such an intellectual process.  The argument from general laws says, There must be a God, because such and such an organic structure must in some way or other have been ultimately due to