he origin of a creature able to feel want
and power, nor yet what want and power spring from. It does not seem
worth while to go into these questions until an understanding has been
come to as to whether the interaction of want and power in some low form
or forms of life which could assimilate matter, reproduce themselves,
vary their actions, and be capable of remembering, will or will not
suffice to explain the development of the varied organs and desires
which we see in the higher vertebrates and man. When this question has
been settled, then it will be time to push our inquiries farther back.

But given such a low form of life as here postulated, and there is no
force in Paley's pretended objection to the Darwinism of his time.

"Give our philosopher," he says, "appetencies; give him a portion of
living irritable matter (a nerve or the clipping of a nerve) to work
upon; give also to his incipient or progressive forms the power of
propagating their like in every stage of their alteration; and if he is
to be believed, he could replenish the world with all the vegetable and
animal productions which we now see in it."[24]

After meeting this theory with answers which need not detain us, he
continues:--

"The senses of animals appear to me quite incapable of receiving the
explanation of their origin which this theory affords. Including under
the word 'sense' the organ and the perception, we have no account of
either. How will our philosopher get at vision or make an eye? Or,
suppose the eye formed, would the perception follow? The same of the
other senses. And this objection holds its force, ascribe what you will
to the hand of time, to the power of habit, to changes too slow to be
observed by man, or brought within any comparison which he is able to
make of past things with the present. Concede what you please to these
arbitrary and unattested superstitions, how will they help you? Here is
no inception. No laws, no course, no powers of nature which prevail at
present, nor any analogous to these would give commencement to a new
sense; and it is in vain to inquire how that might proceed which would
never _begin_."

In answer to this, let us suppose that some inhabitants of another world
were to see a modern philosopher so using a microscope that they should
believe it to be a part of the philosopher's own person, which he could
cut off from and join again to himself at pleasure, and suppose there
were a controversy as