226 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. [CHAP. VIII. 



evidence of design from the ultimate fact to the existence of 

 the chain. Thus, suppose we ascertained that watches are 

 now made by machinery . . . the machinery including the 

 watch forms one more complicated and therefore more 

 evident instance of design." 



"... The only subordinate centres of causation which 

 I have seen formally investigated are men and animals; the 

 latter even are often overlooked. But every well-ascertained 

 law points to some central cause, and at once constitutes 

 that centre a being in the general sense of the word. Whether 

 that being be personal is a question which may be deter- 

 mined by induction. The less difficult question whether the 

 being be intelligent is more practicable, and should be kept 

 in view in the investigation of organised beings. 



" The search for such invisible potencies or wisdoms 

 may appear novel and unsanctioned. . . . For my part I do 

 not think that any speculations about the personality or 

 intelligence of subordinate agents in creation could ever be 

 perverted into witchcraft or demonolatry. 



" Why should not the Original Creator have shared the 

 pleasure of His work with His creatures and made the 

 morning stars sing together, etc.? 



" I suspect that such a hope has prompted many specula- 

 tions of natural historians, who would be ashamed to put it 

 into words. x 



"... Three fallacies (1) Putting the final cause in 

 the place of a physical connection, as when Bernoulli saw the 

 propriety of making the curves of isochronous oscillations 

 and of shortest time of descent both cycloids; (2) The 

 erroneous assertion of a physical relation, as when Bacon 

 supplemented the statement of Socrates about the eyebrows 



1 This Neo-platonic fancy (of SrjfjLiovpyoi), with which the reader 

 may contrast the serio-comic lines on " Paradoxical Philosophy," is 

 embodied in the alternative title of the paper " Ought the Discovery 

 of a Plurality of Intelligent Creators to weaken our Belief in an 

 Ultimate First Cause I" A third title has been added later in the 

 author's hand " Does the Existence of Causal Chains prove an Astral 

 Entity or a Cosmothetic Idealism 1 " 



