PLANTS AND ANIMALS. 33 



irrational to rational life, from brutes to the human species ; 

 without perceiving, as we proceed, any alteration whatever 

 in the terms of the comparison. The rational animal does 

 not produce its offspring with more certainty or success 

 than the irrational animal ; a man than a quadruped, a 

 quadruped than a bird ; nor (for we may follow the grada- 

 tion through its whole scale) a bird than a plant ; nor a 

 plant than a watch, a piece of dead mechanism, would do 

 upon the supposition which has already so olten been re- 

 peated. Rationality therefore has nothing to do in the 

 business. If an account must be given of the contrivance 

 which Vi'e observe ; if it be demanded, whence arose either 

 the contrivance by which the young animal is produced, 

 or the contrivance manifested in the young animal itself, it 

 is not from the reason of the parent that any such account 

 can be drawn. He is the cause of his offspring in the same 

 sense as that in which a gardener is the cause of the tulip 

 which grows upon his parterre, and in no other. We ad- 

 mire the flower ; we examine the plant ; we perceive the 

 conduciveness of many of its parts to their end and office ; 

 we observe a provision for its nourishment, growth, pro- 

 tection, and fecundity : but we never think of the gardener 

 in all this. We attribute nothing of this to his agency ; 

 yet it may still be true, that, without the gardener, we 

 should not have had the tulip Just so it is with the suc- 

 cession of animals even of the highest order. For the 

 contrivance discovered in the structure of the thing pro- 

 duced, we want a contriver. The parent is not that contri- 

 ver. His consciousness decides that question. He is in total 

 ignorance, why that which is produced took its present form 

 rather than any other. It is for him only to be astonished 

 by the effect. We can no more look therefore to the intel- 

 ligence of the parent animal for what we are in search of, 

 a cause of relation and of subserviency of parts to their use, 

 which relation and subserviency we see in the procreated 

 body, than we can refer the internal confirmation of an 

 acorn to the intelligence of the oak from which it dropped, 

 or the structure of the watch to the intelligence of the 

 watch which produced it ; there being no difference, as far 

 as argument is concerned, between an intelligence which 

 is not exerted, and an intelligence which does not exist, 

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