TWO PATHS, ONE GOAL. 



113 



nature alone we may say it fails. Xatiire kiiow^s no " single 

 instances." 



Surely the conception of this order of things as a training- 

 school for the higher faculties of the highest of living things 

 meets the facts of the case with a completeness which cannot 

 be ignored in open court. The reign of moral order, however 

 yet imperfect, is extending its conquest on all the frontiers of 

 barbarism and lower human life, and this is the one witness 

 which was needed to complete the chain of evidence for purpose. 

 Here, too, we see the doul)le side to the evidence as in the 

 .adaptations and organisms before considered. The moral 

 persons on the one hatid, and on the other the surroundings 

 •of growing complexity, the advancing solidarity of the human 

 race, which furnish to the former a scene in wdiicli their moral 

 faculties may be exercised, supply this double line of testimony. 



The five classes of evidence ibr purpose in this globe on which 

 the lot of man is cast may be objected to as being confined to 

 the conditions and inhabitants of one small planet. From the 

 nature of the case evidence is not available for any others of the 

 host of heaven, but our evidence is valid as far as it reaches, 

 and no contrary evidence outside or inside this sphere is forth- 

 ■coming. Nevertheless such scientific proofs as are available for 

 ■other worlds than ours points clearly to a general order under 

 partially ascertainable natural laws. 



Degrees of Purpose. 



We have seen the sense in which the term Purpose is here 

 •employed, but it remains to ask not only for its verbal defini- 

 tion l)ut its limits in the schenie of things around us, in other 

 words, " Where does Pur[)Ose begin and where does it end ? " 

 The answer to this question has been enormously widened since 

 the researches of modern biology have shown the presence of 

 a nervous svsteni in an increasing series of animals; far down 

 the metazoa and the borders of the protozoa, for whei'ever the 

 most rudimentary and elemental nervous apparatus is found 

 there must j\lind be considered to be present in embryo. The 

 gradations which are shown to exist in the ascending scale of 

 animal life up to man are so immensely numerous and yet so 

 minute, that no valid evidence is forthcoming which can prevent 

 ■our looking upon mind as a phenomenon, on its physical side, 

 continuous and growing in complexity from the sense-organs of 

 .a polyp to the brain of a man. Even where a nervous apparatus 

 of the simplest kind is not to be discovered at present, as in 



