13G 
Paley’s statement of the doctrine of an end in Nature was 
from the first open to these two objections. 
(1) Instead of formulating a proposition to be proved, or 
pointing to the sources from which the conviction of its truth 
arises in the mind, Paley tacitly assumed the thing in question, 
and wrapped this assumption in a self-repeating phrase which 
he sought to strengthen by multifarious illustrations. 
(2) Assuming that design or contrivance exists in the whole 
field of Nature, Paley was betrayed into the use of illustra- 
tions, sometimes far-fetched, sometimes superficial or lacking 
confirmation, which wear the appearance of making out a case. 
“ There cannot be design without a designer, contrivance 
without a contriver/ 5 was the axiom upon which Paley built 
up his treatise. He does not seem to have been aware, — at 
least, he takes no notice of the fact, — that Hume had assailed 
this axiom, and the very illustration of the watch by which 
Paley so triumphantly asserts it, at the one point at which it 
might be vulnerable, and if vulnerable, then worthless to 
Paley’s end, viz., that the axiom rests solely upon experience, 
and holds only within the range of possible human action and 
observation. Though Hume's assertion is a fallacy, yet he had 
put it so plausibly that Paley could not afford to pass it by ; 
and by leaving his fundamental premise open to doubt 
and contradiction, Paley failed to establish the existence of a 
Supreme Being from traces of design in Nature, however 
curious and multiplied. Indeed, he himself fell into the com- 
mon fallacy of begging the question in the very statement of it. 
That design implies a designer is as obvious as that thought 
implies a thinker ; but the materialist denies personality to the 
thinking substance ; and to apply the term design to every 
hint of adaptation in Nature, in the sense of an intelligence 
shaping matter to an end, is to assume the existence of God in 
the very form of proving it. 
It was also an error of Paley that he sought to make out the 
goodness of the end, as part of the evidence of a supreme con- 
triver ; or at least to show the preponderance of good over 
evil in apparent ends. In this endeavour he was sometimes 
so unfortunate as to throw the weight of his illustration into 
the opposite scale. Thus, in asserting that “ teeth were made 
to eat, not to ache, 55 he failed to dispose of the fact that they 
do ache, as an objection to any ruling design in their structure 
and composition. Their aching is not always due to some 
violation of nature, since wild beasts in our Zoological Gardens 
sometimes require dental surgery. It will not quiet the 
jumping tooth-ache, nor ease a neuralgic nerve to assure the 
sufferer that teeth and nerves wero not made for the purposo 
