heism; whether it can be rested on anything which in
the order of our thought is prior to theism so as to support or at least
to confirm theism itself.

Our present endeavour is to show that though this argument rests more
easily and securely on theism, yet it need not rest upon it; but
springs, co-ordinately with theism, from _any_ conception of the world
that saves us from mental and moral chaos. Hence it confirms theism and
is confirmed by theism; but each is strictly independent of the other
and rests on a conception prior to both; they diverge from one and the
same root and then intertwine and support one another.

By prescinding from theism I do not mean to exclude or deny it; for it
is, as I have just said, bound up with the same conception from which
the "argument from adaptability" is drawn. I only mean that I do not
need to build upon it as on a prior conception; that I can put it aside.
Indeed, of these two off-shoots, theism is less near to the common root,
as will appear later.

Our limited mind cannot take in at once all the consequences or
presuppositions of a thought; for this would be to know everything; but
as with our outward eye we take in the circle of the horizon bit by bit,
so with our mind when we turn to one aspect of an idea we lose sight of
another. Hence in studying some complex organism or mechanism I may be
clear about the bearing of any part on its immediately neighbouring
parts, and yet may have no present notion of the whole; or may prescind
entirely from the question of its origin or its purpose. Thus our
thoughts are always unfinished and frayed round the edges, and we do not
know how much they involve and drag along with them. We can think of the
mechanism, and the organism, and the design, without thinking of the
mechanist, or the organizer, or the designer; and so in all cases where
two ideas are connected without being actually correlative. What is
commonly called a philosophical proof consists simply in showing us the
implications of some part of the general conception of things that we
already hold. It is to force us either to loosen our hold on that part
or else to admit all that it entails by way of consequences or
presuppositions; and so to bring our thoughts into consistency one way
or the other. But until something sets our mind in motion it can rest
very comfortably in partial conceptions, without following them out to
their results.

Now as we can understand a mechanis