XII.] THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. 287 



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 

 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 be 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 lias the cogged 

 wheels, springs, escapements, oil, &c., which the watch's 

 conception has been supposed to attribute to him; inas- 

 much 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, 

 lor, by the hypothesis, the watch thinks. It must, there- 

 fore, think of its maker as " a thinking being," and in this 

 it is absolutely and completely right}- Either, therefore, the 

 hypothesis is absurd or it actually demonstrates the very 

 position it was chosen to refute. Unquestionably, then, on 

 the mere ground taken by Mr. Herbert Spencer himself, if 

 we are compelled to think of the First Cause either in 

 human terms (but with human imperfections abstracted 

 and human perfections carried to the highest conceivable 



1 In this criticism on Mr. Herbert Spencer, the author finds lie has been 

 anticipated by Mr. James Martineau. (See " Essays," vol. i. p. 208.) 



