PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN. 191 



more than a well-ordered machine. It is improbable that 

 this is the case — highly improbable ; but the falsity of such 

 an hypothesis cannot be proved as you would prove the 

 falsity of the assertion that two and two make five. But 

 then though the hypothesis cannot be thus ruled out of court 

 by demonstration of its absurdity, if. is not, the simplest 

 hypothesis nor is it that one which best accounts for the 

 facts. The assumption, on the other hand, that the men 

 whom I meet every day have minds like my own, perfectly 

 accounts for all llio facts, and is a very simple assumption. 

 It merely extends by induction the sphere 01 a force which 

 1 already know to exist. Or in other words, materialism not 

 giving me an intelligible account of my own individual 

 consciousness I recognise mind, vovs, as a vera causa, as 

 something which really does produce- effects in the field of 

 experience and whicn therefore I may legitimately put 

 forward as the cause of those actions of other men which 

 externally so much resemble my own. But again, 1 repeat, 

 this argument, though entirely convincing to any sane person, 

 is not demonstrative; it is open to the more serious of the 

 objections urged by Kant against the design argument for 

 the existence of a Deity. In his technical language, the 

 reasoning here used would seem to be valid only for the 

 reflective and not for the determinant judgment; for the 

 principle of design, as he is never tired of telling us, or 

 conscious adaptation of means to ends, is not a constitutive 

 principle of experience; it is only a regulative principle 

 introduced to account for the facts. 



Leaving this aside 1'e.r a moment, however, what I am 

 endeavouring to show is that the steps by which 1 mani- 

 festly arrive at my knowledge of the existence of other 

 finite minds are exactly similar to those by which the 

 upholder of the design argument- claims to arrive at the 

 existence of an infinite Mind as the basis of nature, For 

 what is that argument 1 It is this. [ observe certain phe- 

 nomena occurring with order and regularity ; I further 

 observe that all so-called natural processes tend towards an 

 end, that nature is full of purpose, that her working seems 

 to be teleological, not merely mechanical; and 1 assert thai 

 the simplest — nay for me the only intelligible— way of 

 accounting for this wonderful order and purpose is to assume 

 a Mind as the Author of it all. And in making such an 

 assumption (and this is the point 1 wish to emphasise) I am 

 introducing no new and unknown cause; 1 appeal to no 



