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mechanic, to say nothing of the chemistry required for the 

 composition of the several constituent media very well. You 

 add that he asks how the nerve happened to be so exactly fitted 

 to convey the vibrations of the luminous aether which also 

 happened so strangely to surround it ? how there came to be a 

 concurrence of four conditions of things, each utterly independent 

 of each other a nerve sensitive to light, a non-reflecting 

 pigment over it, a transparent medium inverting it, and a 

 strange aether surrounding the whole ? Very well. Let him ask. 

 If his opinion or mine is to give way, I should think I need 

 hardly tell you which must. Surely I must know best. It is 

 all very well for him to say that if there is not here evidence of 

 the power of some One mind, will, forethought, and contrivance 

 to select, arrange, and controul, he can have no evidence of his 

 own existence and individuality. I am above all such argument 

 as that. To "make the worse appear the better reason," is 

 much beyond it, to my mind. He may say, if he likes, that he 

 cannot understand how so complicated a structure as the eye 

 could possibly have been successively improved by any series of 

 accidental variations. Very likely not, but what is his mental 

 capacity in the scale against mine? I can understand it all 

 quite well. " I see no difficulty " whatever in it ergo, my 

 understanding must be vastly superior to his. You perceive, 

 don't you ? He may say that if one of the surfaces of the eye 

 were to be altered, it could not possibly be improved unless the 

 form of the other surface were to be at one and the same time 

 also altered hi the same one only possible way out of millions 

 and all in obedience to an extremely complicated law of optics. 

 Who deniges of it ? It is the very thing I have been saying all 

 along must have taken place, or where would my theory be ? 

 He also objects that if an eye is altered for the better in relation 

 to one set of circumstances, what is there to ensure that the next 

 set shall tend in the same direction towards its ultimate 

 perfection, and not away from it ? and this sort of thing for 

 millions of billions of years ; and if it were to be so, must there 

 not be a bias in that direction, or at all events hi the vast majority 

 of the sets of circumstances, and that implying an Intelligent 

 Will to give the bias, and to make the circumstances all along 



