PALEY, AND THE ARGUMENT FROM CONTRIVANCE 283 



While I am unable to agree with Huxley that natural selection 

 has given the death-blow to the belief that the contrivances of 

 human artificers prove that nature is a contrivance and the work 

 of an artificer, it has, in my opinion, so greatly weakened the value 

 of the evidence for this belief that no one can safely hold that it 

 is conclusive. 



Now, no one who is trained in the methods of science can find 

 in an inconclusive argument any legitimate basis for any other 

 state of mind than a suspension of judgment and a desire for 

 more evidence ; for all must hold it unwise and precarious to base 

 a positive opinion on absence of disproof. 



The hardest of intellectual virtues is philosophic doubt, and 

 the mental vice to which we are most prone is our tendency to 

 believe that lack of evidence for an opinion is a reason for believing 

 something else. This tendency has value in practical matters which 

 call for action, but the man of science need neither starve nor 

 choose. Suspended judgment is the greatest triumph of intellectual 

 discipline, and while vacillation brands the man of affairs with 

 weakness, no opinion on philosophical matters has any value unless 

 it meets all possible contingencies. 



I am neither a materialist nor a monist ; and yet I think it wise 

 to ask what would be the significance of the production of a living 

 being by physico-chemical methods; and this I shall try to do in 

 the next lecture ; for even if living beings and their ways and works 

 were shown to afford no peculiar evidence of purpose or intention, 

 this would not be proof that there is no such evidence in nature ; 

 for it may be that all nature, inorganic and organic alike, affords 

 equal evidence of purpose or intention. 



