SELECTION 469 



realm of organisms: they have, as Air. Balfour si - " exq : 

 site nicety and amazing c -r.xiiy ": they arc :. . : -. 

 counted for; and some of them make for the com: . .-. : 

 what has for Man great value. But it can hardly be ma. 

 tained that the argument in its old form was logically sound. 

 As Professor Lovejoy puts it (190.- . "from knowh._. 

 through experience, that certain effects are caused only 

 purposive human agency, we have no ground wh. U r for 

 concluding that certain other effects, of whose causation 

 have no experience at all. must be due to non-human pur - 

 sive agency ". It has been called by logicians the fa 77(7: : 

 transcendent inference, but perhaps there is a truth : 

 transcendent inference in the idea behind the argumei::. 

 Alanv naturalists know and admire three inonun. 







volumes by the late Prof. Bell Pettigrew entitled D 

 Mature (190^ . They form a magnificent, generously illus- 

 trated treasury of adaptations Bur not the least inter: g 

 thin about these volumes is the fact that the author, with 



_ 



the thousand-and-oue fitnesses before him. found hi ins-, 

 forced, like Darwin, to abandon the position of the Bridge- 

 water Treatises, that one may find in adaptations the evi- 

 dence of Divine Design. There is no doub: as I :hc reality 

 of the thousand-and-oue adaptations: Why is the Bridge- 

 water Treatise position untenable ' 



(1) It is a curious characteristic of some minds that they 

 cannot give a living creature credit for doing anything very 

 wonderful. They refuse to contemplate the possibility that 

 what the creature does inav be accounted for in terms :: 



i 



itself. Thev insist on helping the organism on bv some 



* I 



extraneous introduction an Entelechy, a Purpose in X^:i: 

 an clan vital, a Directive Intelligence, and so for:' What 

 the older Xaturalists should have done before concluding 



