PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN. 187 



same ever since the days of Democritus. Everything that 

 exists, he says, results from a fortuitous concourse of the 

 atoms which are the ultimate constituents of things. What 

 you call mind is but a function of your bodily organism. 

 Thought is merely the result of movement in the grey 

 matter of the brain ; it is, in fact, viewed on the subjective 

 side, a secretion of the brain, just as bile is a secretion of the 

 liver. As it was cynically said by a German physiologist, 

 " Was man isst, das ist er " ; man is what he eats, no more. 

 There is no need to assume any entity — to use a barbarous, 

 but convenient term — any entity, distinct from matter to 

 account for the phenomena of personal consciousness, and 

 so a fortiori there is no need to assume - nay, by the 

 philosophical Law of Parcimony we are absolutely forbidden 

 to assume — any such mysterious power as the basis of nature. 

 The principles of natural selection and of the survival of 

 the fittest furnish us with a sufficient illustration of the 

 order that we fully admit is traceable in the universe ; and 

 that for the simple reason that nothing that is not orderly 

 can continue to exist. Now however sceptical Ave may be 

 as to the principles of natural and sexual selection being the 

 last word that science has tor us on the subject of the order 

 of the universe, yet the general objection here implied 

 would, 1 believe, be unanswerable if the philosophical creed 

 from which it starts, the creed of materialism, were true. 

 The conclusion seems to folio w rigidly from the premises. 

 " Nullus in nhcrocosmo spiritus, nullus in macrocosmo 

 Deus," is a more reliable maxim than most of the aphorisms 

 of scholastic philosophy. And so we cannot dispense our- 

 selves from considering the value of materialism as a system 

 of things. We can never persuade a materialist that the 

 design argument is of any value at all. I shall try to put 

 the accustomed answer of idealists, from Plato down to 

 Green— an answer which seems to me entirely convincing — 

 in two forms. 



(a) We assert boldly that the materialist is guilty all 

 through of one of the commonest of logical fallacies— the 

 fallacy of circular reasoning — and that in the following way. 

 He professes to explain away the necessity for spirit, soul, 

 mind) by asserting that what we call mind is only a function 

 of the bodily organism. 



But let us ask him, what does he mean by the organism, 

 how does he propose to define those atoms whose co-operation 

 he so often invokes? Now mark his reply, his definition 



p 



