ance, there _must_ exist a
supernatural contriver.

"There is in nature the manifestation of supernatural contrivance.

"Therefore a supernatural contriver,--God,--must exist."[284]

Combine the perfection of analogy with the principle of causality, and
you have not only the _verisimilitude_ or _likelihood_ which prepares
the way for belief, but also a positive proof resting on a fundamental
law of reason. The inference of intelligence from marks of design in
nature is not one of analogy, but of strict and proper _induction_; and
accordingly we must either deny that there are marks of _design_ in
nature, thereby discarding the _analogy_, or do violence to our own
reason by resisting the fundamental law of causality, thereby discarding
the inductive inference. And of these two unavoidable alternatives, Mr.
Holyoake seems to prefer the former: he will venture to deny the
existence of design in nature, rather than admit the existence of design
and resist the inevitable inference of a designing cause; for he is
compelled in the long run to come round to this desperate confession,
"What I supposed to be _design_ in the opening of my argument is _no
longer design_. My reverend friend is wrong in supposing that I _admit
design_, and yet refuse to admit the force of the _design argument_."

But if he mistakes the general nature and conditions of the argument
when he speaks of it as if it were a mere argument from analogy, his
_extension of the analogy_, and the reasonings founded on it, are
equally unjustifiable and inconclusive. He forgets that analogy proceeds
on a partial resemblance in _some respects_, between things which differ
_in other respects_, and that even induction itself requires a perfect
resemblance only _in those respects_ on which the inference depends.
There may be such a resemblance between the marks of design in nature
and in art as to warrant the inference of a contriver in both; and yet
_in other respects_ there may be a dissimilarity which cannot in the
least affect the validity or the certainty of that inference. It is only
when we _extend the analogy_ beyond the inductive point, that the
conclusion becomes, in some cases, merely probable, in others altogether
doubtful. If we advance a step further than we are warranted to go by
obvious and certain analogies, our conclusions must be purely
conjectural, and cannot be accepted as inductive inferences. From what
we know of this world, and of God's desig