THE WAY OF ESCAPE/ 175 



"whicli his own design — about which he should know 

 more than any other, and from which, indeed, all his 

 ideas of design are derived — was so complete that 

 there was no chance in any part of it ? Who, again, 

 can bring forward a case even of the purest chance 

 or good luck into which no element of design has 

 entered directly or indirectly at any juncture ? This, 

 nevertheless, does not involve our being unable ever to 

 ascribe a result baldly either to luck or cunning. In 

 some cases a decided preponderance of the action, 

 whether seen as a whole or looked at in detail, is 

 recognised at once as due to design, purpose, fore- 

 thought, skill, and effort, and then we properly disre- 

 gard the undesigned element; in others the details 

 cannot without violence be connected with design, 

 however much the position which rendered the main 

 action possible may involve design — as, for example, 

 there is no design in the way in which individual 

 pieces of coal may hit one another when shot out of 

 a sack, but there may be design in the sack's being 

 brought to the particular place where it is emptied ; 

 in others design may be so hard to find that we 

 rightly deny its existence, nevertheless in each case 

 there will be an element of the opposite, and the 

 residuary element would, if seen through a mental 

 microscope, be found to contain a residuary element 

 of its opposite, and this again of its opposite, and so 

 on ad infinitum, as with mirrors standing face to face. 

 This having been explained, and it being understood 

 that when we speak of design in organism we do so 

 with a mental reserve of exceptis excipiendis, there 



