SELECTION 469 



realm of organisms; they have, as Mr. Balfour says, '' exqui- 

 site nicety and amazing complexity " ; they are not easily ac- 

 counted for; and some of them make for the continuance of 

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

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

 As Professor Lovejoy puts it (1909), ''from knowing, 

 through experience, that certain effects are caused only by 

 purposive human agency, we have no ground whatever for 

 concluding that certain other effects, of whose causation vvc 

 have no experience at all, must be due to non-human purpo- 

 sive agency ". It has been called by logicians the fallacy of 

 transcendent inference, but perhaps there is a truth of 

 transcendent inference in the idea behind the argument. 



Many naturalists know and admire three monumental 

 volumes by the late Prof. Bell Pettigrew entitled Design in 

 Nature (1908). They form a magnificent, generously illus- 

 trated treasury of adaptations. But not the least interesting 

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

 the thousand-and-one fitnesses before him, found himself 

 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 doubt as to the reality 

 of the thousand-and-one 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 may be accounted for in terms of 

 itself. They insist on helping the organism on by some 

 extraneous introduction — an Entelechy, a Purpose in Nature, 

 an elan vital, a Directive Intelligence, and so forth. What 

 the older N^aturalists should have done before concluding 



