272 Anima Mundi. 



solitary reason why. He doubts whether the 

 inference implied may not be 'presumptuous.' 

 He apprehends that we have no 'right to 

 assume that the Creator works by intellectual 

 powers like those of a man.' Truly, of all 

 suggested modes of marking respect for creative 

 power, that of assuming it to have worked un- 

 intelligently is the most original." 1 



" From what I know, through my own speci- 

 ality, both geometry and experiment, of the 

 structure of lenses and the human eye, I do not 

 believe that any amount of evolution, extending 

 through any amount of time consistent with 

 the requirements of our astronomical knowledge, 

 could have issued in the production of that 

 most beautiful and complicated instrument, the 

 human eye. There are too many curved sur- 

 faces, too many distances, too many densities 

 of the media, each essential to the other, too 

 great a facility of ruin by slight disarrangement, 

 to admit of anything short of the intervention 

 of an intelligent Will at some stage of the 

 evolutionary process. The most perfect, and at 

 the same time the most difficult optical con- 

 trivance known is the powerful achromatic 

 object glass of a microscope; its structure is 

 the long-unhoped-for result of the ingenuity of 



1 Thornton : " Old- Fashioned Ethics," pp. 238, 239. 



