HI 
produces this conviction instantaneously ; and no amount 
of experience could render the conviction more certain. The 
conviction that a particular combination of means for an end 
is the product of a designing cause, is not at all dependent 
upon the “ experience ” of such cause in like cases. 
Neither does the conviction that adaptation proceeds 
from design rest upon “ experience ” in any case whatever. 
That the adaptation of means to an end proceeds from an 
intelligent and purposing foresight of that end is an intuitive 
conviction of the human mind. To be convinced of this 
causal connection the mind requires neither argument nor 
observation ; it could accept no other explanation of the 
existence of the event. The mind assumes this causal rela- 
tion of intelligence to adaptation, in those very observations 
of nature or discoveries of inventive skill which Mr. Hume 
would include in the term “ experience.” 
As the print of a human foot upon the sand gave to 
Robinson Crusoe the immediate conviction that there was 
another man upon what he had supposed to be his uninhabited 
island; as the impressions of feet, talons, fins, vertebras, 
embedded in rock, certify the geologist of extinct races ; so 
does the least token of adaptation at once articulate itself with 
the conception of design. 
In the gravel-beds of the Somme were picked up at first a 
few flint stones, bearing rude marks of having been shaped for 
use. No human remains were associated with them. The 
beds in which they lay were hitherto supposed to antedate 
the appearance of man ; yet these shapen flints produced in 
every observer the instantaneous conviction that man was 
there at the period of this formation. When once the eye 
had satisfied itself that these forms were not the result of 
natural attrition, were not worn but shaped, — that this flint, 
however rudely shaped, was intended for a knife or a hatchet, 
this block for a hammer, this pointed stone for a spear, — the 
mind at once pronounced it the work of man. The adaptation 
points to design, and the design points to a grade of human 
intelligence. It does not matter that we cannot divine the 
specific use of this or that implement ; if the object itself 
shows that it was shaped for some use, if it is not merely a 
stone but an implement, there springs up at sight of it the 
necessary conviction that this was the work of a designing 
cause. Hence Hume's appeal to “ experience ” is fallacious in 
the general as well as in the particular. 
Equally fallacious is Hume’s objection to the analogy from 
the products of human design to the works of a higher 
intelligence. The scale of the works, the vastness of the 
vor,. xiii. l 
