would be should likewise maintain that the origination of individuals
by generation is incompatible with design, and so take a consistent
atheistical view of Nature. Perhaps we might all have confidently
thought so, antecedently to experience of the fact of reproduction.
Let our experience teach us wisdom.

These illustrations make it clear that the evidence of design from
structure and adaptation is furnished complete by the individual
animal or plant itself, and that our knowledge or our ignorance of the
history of its formation or mode of production adds nothing to it and
takes nothing away. We infer design from certain arrangements and
results; and we have no other way of ascertaining it. Testimony,
unless infallible, cannot prove it, and is out of the question here.
Testimony is not the appropriate proof of design: adaptation to
purpose is. Some arrangements in Nature appear to be contrivances, but
may leave us in doubt. Many others, of which the eye and the hand are
notable examples, compel belief with a force not appreciably short of
demonstration. Clearly to settle that these must have been designed
goes far towards proving that other organs and other seemingly less
explicit adaptations in Nature must also have been designed, and
clinches our belief, from manifold considerations, that all Nature is
a preconcerted arrangement, a manifested design. A strange
contradiction would it be to insist that the shape and markings of
certain rude pieces of flint, lately found in drift deposits, prove
design, but that nicer and thousand-fold more complex adaptations to
use in animals and vegetables do not _a fortiori_ argue design.

We could not affirm that the arguments for design in Nature are
conclusive to all minds. But we may insist, upon grounds already
intimated, that whatever they were good for before Darwin's book
appeared, they are good for now. To our minds the argument from design
always appeared conclusive of the being and continued operation of an
intelligent First Cause, the Ordainer of Nature; and we do not see
that the grounds of such belief would be disturbed or shifted by the
adoption of Darwin's hypothesis. We are not blind to the philosophical
difficulties which the thorough-going implication of design in Nature
has to encounter, nor is it our vocation to obviate them. It suffices
us to know that they are not new nor peculiar difficulties,--that, as
Darwin's theory and our reasonings upon it did not r