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industry of man, as we are otherwise acquainted with the 
nature of the animal, we can draw a hundred inferences con- 
cerning what may be expected from him ; and these inferences 
will all be founded in experience and observation.'” Hence 
he concludes, we cannot “from the course of Nature infer 
a particular intelligent cause, which first bestowed and still 
preserves order in the universe,”* inasmuch as we have had no 
experience of such a cause in Nature, upon which to ground 
this inference. 
At least three oversights or misconceptions are apparent in 
this statement. 
(1.) Mr. Hume overlooks the fact that each man is conscious 
of a designing faculty within himself, and does not need to 
be certified of the adaptation of means to ends through the 
observation of this faculty in other men. There was a time 
when a first man invented the first machine, or adapted some- 
thing to his own ends ; and surely he had no experience of 
design in other men to create faith in himself as a designer. 
He put forth a conscious power ; his experience of what he 
could accomplish confirmed his conception of design, but did 
not create it. So it is with us all. When we see adaptation 
to an end, we say at once, Here was an intelligent cause, 
and this not because we have observed that other men 
have produced designs, but knowing ourselves as intel- 
ligent designing causes, we of course refer adaptation to 
intelligence. 
(2.) This points us to Hume^s second oversight; he fails to 
perceive that the single thing to which adaptation refers us is 
intelligence. It is not man in general as a being or an animal, 
but the intelligent spirit in man that is immediately and in- 
dissolubly connected with the notion of adaptation. Man 
does many things that are purely animal ; he eats, walks, 
sleeps, like other animals, by an instinct or a law of his nature, 
and we never think of ascribing such acts to an intelligence 
superior to physical laws and functions. But the adaptation 
of means to ends we refer directly to such intelligence ; and 
it is this thing of intelligence that differentiates such effects 
from purely physical sequences by the nature of their causes. 
Crunched bones on a desert island might suggest beasts of 
prey, but a cairn suggests man. An approach to such adap- 
tation on the part of the beaver, the bee, the dog, the ant, 
disposes us to clothe such animals with the attribute of reason. 
And on the same principle, — that it is intelligence and not 
man we think of directly we perceive adaptation, — do we refer 
such adaptation in Nature to an intelligence higher than Nature 
* “ Prov. and Fut. State,” vol. iv. p. 168. 
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