THE ARGTUMENT APPLIED. 49 



any argumentation. We are not contented with this an> 

 swer ; we find no satisfaction in it, by way of accounting 

 for appearances of organization far short of those of the eye, 

 such as we observe in fossil shells, petrified bones, or other 

 substances which bear the vestiges of animal or vegetable 

 recrements, but which, either in respect to utility or of the 

 /lituation in which they are discovered, may seem accidental 

 enough. It is no way of accounting even for these things, 

 to say that the stone, for instance, which is shown to us — 

 supposing the question to be concerning a petrifaction — must 

 have contained some internal conformation or other. Nor 

 does it mend the answer to add, with respect to the singu- 

 larity of the conformation, that after the event, it is no lon- 

 ger to be computed what the chances were against it. This 

 is' always to be computed when the question is, whether a 

 useful or imitative conformation be the produce of chance or 

 not : I desire no greater certainty in reasoning than that by 

 which chance is excluded from the present disposition of the 

 natural world. Universal experience is against it. What 

 does chance ever do for us? In the human body, for in- 

 stance, chance, that is, the operation of causes without de- 

 sign, may produce a wen, a wart, a mole, a pimple, but 

 never an eye. Among inanimate substances, a clod, a peb- 

 ble, a liquid drop might be ; but never was a watch, a tele- 

 scope, an organized body of any kind, answering a valuable 

 purpose by a complicated mechanism, the effect of chance. 

 In no assignable instance has such a thing existed without 

 intention somewhere. 



IV. There is another answer which has the same effect 

 as th,e resolving of things mto chance ; which answer would 

 pvjrsuade us to believe that the eye, the animal to which it 

 Lelongs, every other animal, every plant, indeed every or- 

 ganized body which we see, are only so many out of th(5 

 possible varieties and combinations of being which the lapse 

 of infinite ages has brought into existence ; that the present 

 world is the relic of that variety ; millions of other bodily 



