How Theories are Manufactured 95 



elements of beauty with which he is familiar, in the 

 handicraft of his own kind, proceeds to "read in" an 

 intention, and to fancy that Nature, or whatever that 

 word represents, had an artistic end in view. If man 

 recognizes beauty when he sees it, no matter where, and 

 if his recognition corresponds to a reality, then he has 

 a sense, which, till it first met with a beautiful thing, 

 could in no way be accounted for by circumstances. 

 Just as the idea of colour must have been existent to 

 evoke coloration, so the idea of beauty must be in the 

 mind that picks out one object or one arrangement as 

 more beautiful than another, and selects it for repro- 

 duction. It might seem therefore that judgment in this 

 matter goes by default. On the one hand we have no 

 experience of artistic work as the product of anything 

 but artistic purpose. On the other hand we find artistic 

 work in Nature, vastly superior in merit to our own, and 

 we find no possible motive to explain it in any blind 

 mechanical machinery. Is it unreasonable to trace in 

 it a purpose like in kind to that of which we are con- 

 scious in ourselves ? 



But this is not all. We have not to go far in the 

 records of observation to find distinct evidence of an 

 immanent purposive tendency, working in nature in 

 definite directions. It is certainly not from what we 

 see, that we learn to describe the tendency to variations 

 in plants and animals as being merely centrifugal, like 

 the expansion of a gas. On the contrary there are clear 

 indications of a something in the organism itself guiding 

 definitely in one direction. To illustrate this by examples 

 It has been said that the tribe of Birds of Paradise seem 

 to have an innate tendency to vary ir> the direction of 

 beauty, a tendency satisfied in such diverse modes as 

 to preclude the notion that they have all been hit upon, 

 within the limits of the same family, by blind accident. 

 Now one set of feathers and now another are wonder- 

 fully developed and coloured. In the Six-shafted Bird 

 it is those of the head that form its peculiar ornament, 

 being lengthened into slender wires with a small oval 



