asonry,
furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have
been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which
might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous
conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its
beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other
principles, restrictive in their operation. The first is physical:
Nature's forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and
destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture.

This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of
recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second principle
is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for us
is "disorderly" can possibly have been an object of design at all.
This principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests of
anthropomorphic Theism.

When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or
the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them,
are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of
arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral--so interested that whenever
we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The
result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It
is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but
order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one
can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any
chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table,
I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave
the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and
you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured
beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing
material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast
plenum in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable
directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we
trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named
nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things "unadapted" to
each other in this world than there are things "adapted"; infinitely
more things with irregular relations than with regular relations
between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively,
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