274? THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN 



a great number of instances in which it cannot yet be 

 shown to be the sufficient cause. But these are merely 

 difficulties in the application of the theory, and although 

 the anti-Darwinians rest their reputation as philoso- 

 phers on these difficulties, yet it is impossible for us to 

 rest our belief in the being and attributes of God on 

 such a foundation as the residuum of unexplained 

 phenomena in the world of biological science at any 

 particular time, and which is diminishing daily by the 

 progress of knowledge. We must therefore abandon 

 at once the argument of design furnished by the 

 organic world as anything superior to, or differing in 

 principle from, that furnished by the inorganic, and 

 the teleological significance of the former must be 

 reduced to no greater, but also to no less, than that of 

 the latter. For long the expansion of water on freezing 

 was brought forward as an instance of beneficent 

 design, being an apparent exception to the general law 

 of contraction of all bodies by cold, for the purpose of 

 preventing lakes and rivers from freezing to the 

 bottom, whereby a large part of the globe would 

 have been rendered uninhabitable for man. But since 

 it has been found that bismuth, iron, and several other 



will be readily admitted that each individual is composed of a number 

 of vital units specifically different, built up in harmony by certain laws 

 of germinal development, and maintained in harmonious action by the 

 ties of a common circulation and nervous system. It is otherwise, how- 

 ever, with the Mind, and, as yet, few are prepared to admit that the 

 unity and consciousness of personal identity of each animal can be pro- 

 duced without a single essence or immaterial principle, -which, it is 

 said, works through or by the separate cerebral faculties. Nevertheless, 

 however little we can, as yet, understand or explain how this unity is 

 produced by the harmonious working of an extremely complicated con- 

 geries of separate parts, yet we must admit that it is the fact ; for thia 

 sense of unity and personal identity may be impaired, or even lost, like 

 Other mental faculties, by disease and decrepitude. 



