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the theistic position and Mr. Spencer's, may be supplied by an example he
has himself proposed. Thus,[254] he imagines an intelligent watch
speculating as to its maker, and conceiving of him in terms of watch-being,
and figuring him as furnished with springs, escapements, cogged wheels,
&c., his motions facilitated by oil--in a word, like himself. It is assumed
by Mr. Spencer that this necessary watch conception would be completely
false, and the illustration is made use of to show "the presumption of
theologians"--the absurdity and unreasonableness of those men who figure
the incomprehensible cause of all phenomena as a Being in some way
comparable with man. Now, putting aside for the moment all other
considerations, and accepting the illustration, surely the example
demonstrates rather the unreasonableness of the _objector himself_! It is
true, indeed, that a man is an organism indefinitely more complex and
perfect than any watch; but if the watch could only conceive of its maker
in watch terms, or else in terms altogether inferior, the watch would
plainly be right in speaking of its maker as a, to it, inconceivably {250}
perfect kind of watch, acknowledging at the same time, that this, its
conception of him, was _utterly inadequate_, although the best its inferior
nature allowed it to form. For if, instead of so conceiving of its maker,
it refused to make use of these relative perfections as a makeshift, and so
necessarily thought of him as amorphous metal, or mere oil, or by the help
of any other inferior conception which a watch might be imagined capable of
entertaining, that watch would he wrong indeed. For man can much more
properly be compared with, and has much more affinity to, a perfect watch
in full activity than to a mere piece of metal, or drop of oil. But the
watch is even more in the right still, for its maker, man, virtually _has_
the cogged wheels, springs, escapements, oil, &c., which the watch's
conception has been supposed to attribute to him; inasmuch as all these
parts must have existed as distinct ideas in the human watchmaker's mind
before he could actually construct the clock formed by him. Nor is even
this all, for, by the hypothesis, the watch _thinks_. It must, therefore,
think of its maker as "a thinking being," and in this it is _absolutely and
completely right_.[255] Either, therefore, the hypothesis is _absurd_ or it
actually _demonstrates the very position it was chosen to refute_.
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