s to give the best
provisional account of the order of Nature, by supposing an infinite
extension of some of the faculties of the human mind, with a concurrent
obliteration of all the essential conditions under which alone these
faculties are known to exist. Obviously of such a Mind as this no
predication is logically possible. If such a Mind exists, it is not
conceivable as existing, and we are precluded from assigning to it any
attributes.

Thus much on general grounds. Descending now to matters of more detail,
let us assume with the natural theologians that such a Mind does exist,
that it so far resembles the human mind as to be a conscious, personal
intelligence, and that the care of such a Mind is over all its works.
Even upon the grounds of this supposition we meet with a number of large
and general facts which indicate that this Mind ought still to be
regarded as apparently very unlike its 'image' in the mind of man. I
will not here dwell upon the argument of seeming waste and purposeless
action in Nature, because I think that this may be fairly met by the
ulterior argument already drawn from Nature as a whole--viz. that as a
whole, Nature is a cosmos, and therefore that what to us appears
wasteful and purposeless in matters of detail may not be so in relation
to the scheme of things as a whole. But I am doubtful whether this
ulterior argument can fairly be adduced to meet the apparent absence in
Nature of that which in man we term morality. For in the human mind the
sense of right and wrong--with all its accompanying or constituting
emotions of love, sympathy, justice, &c.--is so important a factor, that
however greatly we may imagine the intellectual side of the human mind
to be extended, we can scarcely imagine that the moral side could ever
become so apparently eclipsed as to end in the authorship of such a work
as we find in terrestrial nature. It is useless to hide our eyes to the
state of matters which meets us here. Most of the instances of special
design which are relied upon by the natural theologian to prove the
intelligent nature of the First Cause, have as their end or object the
infliction of painful death or the escape from remorseless enemies; and
so far the argument in favour of the intelligent nature of the First
Cause is an argument against its morality. Again, even if we quit the
narrower basis on which teleological argument has rested in the past,
and stand that argument upon the broader grou