258 Chance, Causation, and Design. [CHAP. x. 



try to secure a yet uncommoner occurrence than that in 

 question. If the supporters of thought-transference have 

 the courage of their convictions, as they most assuredly 

 have, they would not shrink from accepting this test. I 

 am inclined to think that even at present, on such evidence 

 as that above, the probability that the results were got at by 

 ordinary guessiog is very small. 



20. The problems discussed in the preceding sections 

 are at least intelligible even if they are not always resol 

 vable. But before finishing this chapter we must take notice 

 of some speculations upon this part of the subject which do not 

 seem to keep quite within the limits of what is intelligible. 

 Take for instance the question discussed by Arbuthnott (in 

 a paper in the Phil. Transactions, Vol. xxvii.) under the 

 title &quot; An Argument for Divine Providence, taken from the 

 constant Regularity observed in the birth of both sexes.&quot; Had 

 his argument been of the ordinary teleological kind ; that 

 is, had he simply maintained that the existent ratio of ap 

 proximate equality, with a six per cent, surplusage of males, 

 was a beneficent one, there would have been nothing here to 

 object against. But what he contemplated was just such a 

 balance of alternate hypotheses between chance and design 

 as we are here considering. His conclusion in his own words 

 is, &quot; it is art, not chance, that governs.&quot; 



It is difficult to render such an argument precise without 

 rendering it simply ridiculous. Strictly understood it can 

 surely bear only one of two interpretations. On the one 

 hand we may be personifying Chance : regarding it as an 

 agent which must be reckoned with as being quite capable 

 of having produced man, or at any rate having arranged the 

 proportion of the sexes. And then the decision must be 

 drawn, as between this agent and the Creator, which of the 

 two produced the existent arrangement. If so, and Chance 



