INTRODUCTORY EXPLANATION. 25 



brated work of Paley may be considered as a treatment 

 of the following syllogism : ' f If there be contrivance, 

 there was design; but there is contrivance, there- 

 fore there was design," the minor of which is proved by 

 appeal to observation. But the author refers the 

 opponent to the beauty and ingenuity of the methods in 

 which the contrivance is brought about : to the general 

 effect on our notions of what is done, compared with what 

 we could do. It may very often be discovered what the 

 real tenor of an argument is, by observing what would 

 refute it : now imagine an individual possessed with the 

 notion that he could execute * better contrivances, and 

 Paley 's argument must (to him) be imagined to be ineffec- 

 tive, t It appears to me that the result of the treatise in 

 question is this : f{ If there be a contriver, he must be 

 one of infinite power and intellect." But the argument of 

 contrivance against chance cannot, from the complication 

 and non-numerical character of the instances, be illustrated 

 by any reference to what might have been if chance had 

 prevailed. Taking, for example, the chamois, as the 

 result of a contrivance for the support of animal life on 

 frozen mountains, we have no method of comparing the 

 chamois of design with any notion that we can form, 

 and call the chamois of chance. But where a consider- 

 ation is pure number, we then have other ideas, of the 

 homogeneity of which with that in question, we feel 

 assured : and we can absolutely try the question with 

 chance in precisely the same manner as we try it in the 

 common affairs of life. Let us assume, as we must, 

 that a number produced by chance alone (in the anti- 

 deistical sense of the word,) might as well have been 

 any other as what it is. And further, let us require 

 before we grant intelligence and contrivance, not merely 

 the presence of an adaptation which would have been 

 unlikely from chance alone, but two such phenomena, 



* Such as is said actually to have struck Alfonso of Portugal, when the 

 Ptolemaic theory of the heavens was explained to him. 



f The fault of "most treatises on Natural Theology is to draw the reader's 

 attention from the mere design, to the complication and ingenuity of the 

 design. The Bridgwater Treatises have a consistent title, and it is worthy 

 of remark, that this was the doing of the testator himself, 



