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lowest ground, the latter alternative is quite as probable as 
the former. 
6. A few words more on the limits under which alone the 
argument from Design is tenable. Many of its opponents 
imagine that it ought to assign a purpose for every thing 
under the sun. This is a most unreasonable demand. It 
totally ignores the imperfection of our knowledge, the finite 
range of our faculties. We must be content to remain ig- 
norant of much, especially of the higher Final Causes. What 
is the Purpose of Comets ? We admit our ignorance. What 
is the Final Cause of Saturn's rings, of double stars, of the 
varying inclination of planetary axes to the plane of the 
ecliptic, of a thousand other phenomena in the visible world ? 
A sober thinker admits at once that these question are beyond 
our ken : it was such final causes as these that Bacon ought 
to have condemned as misleading. In the same way I do 
not know that any judicious advocate of Design asserts 
that an “ organism is launched directly at a purpose," as 
Professor Huxley curiously puts it ; what we assert is, that 
organs aim at a distinct end, not organisms , — an important dis- 
tinction. Many Final Causes are thus totally beyond our 
range ; but that is no reason why we should shut our eyes 
to those which lie obviously in our path. Yet Materialists 
argue in this way: If you can show no purpose in the desolate 
planets and their superfluous moons, you must not talk to me 
about the eye. 
7. From the nature of the case the argument from Design 
must be denied by certain schools of thought as it is fatal to 
their fundamental theories. The Agnostics cannot be expected 
to admit it, or they would, by doing so, cease to be Agnostics. 
I have not myself read Herbert Spencer, so I will quote the 
estimate of his ultimate tendency from a critic whose impar- 
tiality and ability are universally recognised, Paul Janet : * 
“ All Mr. H. Spencer's scientific apparatus, the whole mass 
of these examples accumulated to satiety, all that mechanical 
and dynamical terminology, can neither mask nor relieve this 
low and common result, the only one that can be disentangled 
from these diffuse amplifications ; namely, that organic forms 
are the product of fortuitous combinations of matter. And 
no other hypothesis is possible : hence any internal or external 
directive principle is rejected. The fortuitous is the veritable 
artist, the seminal agent of nature." Materialists again of 
Haeckel's school are ex hypothesi incapable of fairly con^ 
* Final Causes (Eng. trans., p. 313). 
