“The argument from utility may be equally refuted another way.  We found in our discussion of the mark of adaptation that the positive evidence of design afforded by the mechanisms of the human frame was never accompanied by the possibility of negative evidence.  We regarded this as a suspicious circumstance, just as the fox, invited to attend the lion in his den, was deterred from his visit by observing that all the foottracks lay in one direction.  The same suspicious circumstance warns us now.  If positive evidence of design be afforded by the presence of a faculty, negative evidence of design ought to be afforded by the absence of a faculty.  This, however, is not the case.” [Then follows the account of a butterfly, which, from the wonderful power of the males to find the females at a great distance, is conceived to possess a sixth sense.] “Do we consider the deficiency of this sixth sense in man as the slightest evidence against design?  Should we be less apt to infer creative wisdom if we had only four senses instead of five, or three instead of four?  No, the case would stand precisely as it does now.  We value our senses simply because we have them, and because our conception of life as we desire it is drawn from them.  But to reason from such value to the origin of our endowment, to argue that our senses must have been given to us by a deity because we prize them, is evidently to move round and round in a vicious circle.

“The same rejoinder is easily applicable to the argument from beauty, which indeed is only a particular aspect of the argument from utility.  It is certainly improbable that a random daubing of colors on a canvas will produce a tolerable painting, even should the experiment be continued for thousands of years.  Our conception of beauty being given, it is utterly improbable that chance should select, out of the infinity of combinations which form and color may afford, the precise combination which that conception will approve.  But the universe is not posterior to our sense of beauty, but antecedent to it:  our sense of beauty grows out of what we see; and hence the conformance of our world to our aesthetical conceptions is evidence, not of the world’s origin, but of our own.”

We are accustomed to hear design doubted on account of certain failures of provision, waste of resources, or functionless condition of organs; but it is refreshingly new to have the very harmony itself of man with his surroundings, and the completeness of provision for his wants and desires, brought up as a refutation of the validity of the argument for design.  It is hard, indeed, if man must be out of harmony with Nature in order to judge anything respecting it, or his relations with it; if he must have experience of chaos before he can predicate anything of order.