thought in that relation than would some other hypothetical substance which
is imagined as more akin to mind. And if it is said that the _more_
conceivable cause is the _more_ probable cause, we have seen that it is in
this case impossible to estimate the validity of the remark. Lastly, the
statement that the cause must contain actually all that its effects can
contain, was seen to be inadmissible in logic and contradicted by everyday
experience; while the argument from the supposed freedom of the will and
the existence of the moral sense was negatived both deductively by the
theory of evolution, and inductively by the doctrine of utilitarianism. On
the whole, then, with regard to the argument from the existence of the
human mind, we were compelled to decide that it is destitute of any
assignable weight, there being nothing more to lead to the conclusion that
our mind has been caused by another mind, than to the conclusion that it
has been caused by anything else whatsoever.

With regard to the argument from Design, it was observed that Mill's
presentation of it 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 c