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and higher than man. It is Intelligence that we associate with 
adaptation, and we are not limited to intelligence as mani- 
fested by man as an animal of skill and industry. In point of 
fact the great advances of physical science in recent times have 
been due more to the imaginative and inventive faculty 
prompting investigation, than to inference from experience. 
Science itself looks forward, not backward. Its spirit is in- 
quisitive, and its discoveries spring from the desire to know 
not only what is, but why it is, — to reach at once the first 
elements of things and their final cause. 
And (3.) Hume has overlooked the fact that when once this 
idea of the connection between adaptation and intelligence has 
entered the mind, from whatever source, it does not require to 
be renewed, but remains always as an iutuitive perception ; 
no amount of experiences can strengthen or weaken it, and 
this for the reason that the conviction of a designing cause 
does not rest in observations or experiences, greater or less, 
of man and his contrivances, but lies in the thing of perceived 
adaptation ; it does not require a knowledge of the cause or 
source of the adaptation. That wherever there is an adapta- 
tion of means to an end, there must have been an intelligent 
cause is an intuition of the mind. This term intuition should 
not be confounded with the notion of innate ideas. An intui- 
tion is a self-evident truth ; the mind may come to the know- 
ledge of such a truth in various ways, and by many processes ; 
but when once it is perceived, it is seen to be true, as a pro- 
position in and of itself, which no amount of reasoning or of 
evidence could make clearer or stronger than it is in its own 
simple statement. For example, the sum of all the parts is 
together equal to the whole. (A child may learn this, if you 
please, by trying it; but once gained it is there.) Everything 
that begins to be must have a cause ; whatever exists must 
exist in time and in space. To this class of self-convincing 
truths belongs this also, that the adaptation of means to an 
end springs from an intelligent and designing cause. Under 
these criticisms of common sense and of universal conscious- 
ness Hume’s elaborate structure falls to the ground. 
I am aware that this reasoning involves the interminable 
controversy between sensation and consciousness as the 
originator of ideas. But it is clear that external phenomena 
do not and cannot impart to us the idea of a cause. We 
cannot see a cause, feel a cause, hear a cause. What we 
perceive in Nature is never cause as a substantial entity, but 
only the sequence of phenomena. And yet the mind unhesi- 
tatingly affirms of every phenomenon which actually comes to 
pass, that it is not self-originated, but must have had a cause. 
Whence has the mind this conception of the necessary rela- 
