gS PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



perhaps, according to Darwin, injurious ones might come 

 in, and the being perish ; so that the beginning of im- 

 provements would be lost for ever. 



Paley sums up the " cumulative argument " thus : 

 " The proof is not a conclusion which lies at the end of 

 a chain of reasoning, of which chain each instance of 

 contrivance is only a link, and of which, if one link fail, 

 the whole fails ; but it is an argument separately supplied 

 by every separate example. An error in stating an 

 example affects only that example. The argument is 

 cumulative in the fullest sense of that term. The eye 

 proves it without the ear ; the ear without the eye. The 

 proof in each example is complete ; for when the design 

 of the part, and the conduciveness of its structure to that 

 design is shown, the mind may set itself at rest ; no 

 future consideration can detract anything from the force 

 of the example." 



This passage is, of course, equally applicable to the 

 evolutionary origin of the eye and ear by protoplasmic 

 adaptations instead of being designed. 



Darwin — in spite of the logical conclusion to which 

 Natural Selection might have brought him, as it did 

 Haeckel and Biichner — could not refrain from exclaiming, 

 in comparing Evolution with Creation by fiat : " There 

 is a grandeur in this view of Life, with its several powers 

 having been originally breathed by the Creator into a 

 few forms or into one ; and that . . . from so simple 

 a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most 

 wonderful have been and are being evolved." ^ 



Through all the illustrations which Paley gives, there 

 is in the background that Directivity or Determination 

 towards an object, which we have seen to be so obvious 



1 Origin of Species, 6th cd., 1878, p. 429. 



