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of giving pain. Indeed, it is quite a popular fancy that nerves 
are demons of evil. The whence and the wherefore of evil must 
be taken into view in forming an estimate of the end for which 
a thing was made, of unity and wisdom in its design, or of any 
purpose whatever in its existence. But the question of a final 
cause in things is not to be set aside by some single character- 
istic or quality of a thing which seems to mark it as useless or 
even injurious. 
That every event argues a cause is an intuitive, not an 
experimental, conviction of the human mind. Whether the 
cause is intelligent and purposing, or is only a material or an 
accidental antecedent, is to be determined by observation and 
analysis of the thing itself in its place, and its relations. 
Moral qualities or purposes, suggested by certain properties 
of a thing as inhei’ing in the Cause, — if Cause there be, — do 
not necessai’ily enter into the proof of the existence of an 
intelligent Cause, which might be either good or evil. 
Stripping Paley’s statement of its verbal assumptions, and 
setting aside such of his illustrations as are crude or anti- 
quated, his fundamental argument for the Creator as evinced 
by the traces of design in Nature is not only tenable in face 
of the more recent discoveries of science, but is illustrated and 
confirmed by a far richer array of natural phenomena than 
Paley had ever imagined. We may improve, however, upon 
bis statement of the doctrine of final causes as follows : 
The perceived collocation or combination of phenomena or 
forces in Nature toward a given result, produces in the mind 
the immediate conviction of an intelligent purpose behind such 
phenomena and forces. This statement, while it retains the 
essence of Paley’s axiom, avoids his logical vice of including 
in the definition the very term to be defined. A fixed series 
of events may be mechanical; but the combination of several 
independent series of phenomena toward a distinctive result 
must be referred to Thought purposing that event. Nature 
with all her forces and material has never produced a 
single thing that answers to the idea of an invention. 
This is always the product of human intelligence applied 
to the powers and substances of Nature. The contri- 
vance seen in a machine instantly refers us to the mind as 
its cause. Thus, electricity is a power everywhere present in 
Nature ; yet electricity has never produced an electrical 
machine, an electric telegraph or telephone, or an electric 
light. But though Nature cannot turn her own powers into a 
practical machine, and the least hint of an adaptation of these 
powers to the purposes of man suggests the intervention of the 
human intellect, yet the natural powers which man subordi- 
