16 NATUKAL THEOLOGY. 



rangement, without any thing capable of arranging ; subser- 

 viency and relation to a purpose, without that which could 

 intend a purpose ; means suitable to an end, and executing 

 their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever 

 having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it. 

 Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to 

 an end, relation of instruments to a use, imply the presence 

 of intelligence and mind. No one, therefore, can rationally 

 believe that the insensible, inanimate watch, from which the 

 watch before us issued, was the proper cause of the mechan- 

 ism we so much admire m it — could be truly said to have 

 constructed the instrument, disposed its parts, assigned theu 

 office, determined their order, action, and mutual dependen- 

 cy, combined their several motions into one result, and that 

 also a result connected with the utihties of other beings. All 

 these properties, therefore, are as much unaccomited for aa 

 they were before. 



IV. Nor is any thing gained by running the difficulty 

 farther back, that is, by supposing the watch before us to 

 have been produced from another watch, that from a former, 

 and so on indefinitely. Our going back ever so far brings 

 us no nearer to the least degree of satisfaction upon the sub- 

 ject. Contrivance is still unaccounted for. "We still want 

 a contriver. A designing mind is neither supplied by this 

 supposition nor dispensed with. If the difficulty were dimin- 

 ished the farther we went back, by going back indefinitely 

 v/e might exhaust it. And this is the only case to which 

 this sort of reasoning applies. "Where there is a tendency, 

 or, as we increase the number of terms, a continual approach 

 towards a limit, there, by supposing the number of terms to 

 be what is called infinite, we may conceive the limit to be 

 attained ; but where there is no such tendency or approach, 

 nothing is effected by lengthening the series. There is no 

 difference as to the point in question, whatever there may 

 be as to many points, between one series and another — be« 

 Iween a series which is finite, and a series which is infinite. 



