Scientific Sophisms. 273 



many powerful minds ; yet in complexity and in 

 perfection it falls infinitely below the structure 

 of the eye. Disarrange any one of the curva- 

 tures of the many surfaces, or distances, or 

 densities of the latter ; or worse, disarrange its 

 incomprehensible self-adaptive power, the like 

 of which is possessed by the handiwork of 

 nothing human, and all the opticians in the 

 world could not tell you what is the correlative 

 alteration necessary to repair it, and still less to 

 improve it, as natural selection is presumed to 

 imply.' 



15. The case is too strong to be explained 

 away. Nature is full of plan, and yet she plans 

 not : she is only plastic to a plan. That plan 

 carries with it its own unanswerable attestation 

 to all healthy understandings. It has its warp 

 indeed, as well as its woof. The exquisite 

 variety of creative adjustments reposes on a 

 basis of fundamental order : exhaustless speci- 

 alities of adaptation are engrafted on a per.vasive 

 unity of type. Morphology, rightly viewed, is 

 not the negation, but one grand phase of the 

 revelation of plan. Teleology is the other. " It 

 has been by following the lamp of Final Cause, 

 and obeying her beckoning hand, that the 



1 Professor Pritchard's .Address at the Brighton Con- 

 gress (1874). 



