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nothing else did ; and that something else must be capable 
of rational and intelligible description and proof of its capacity 
for doing the business before we need attend to it. We 
have seen that the “ Apostle of Evolution” cannot make 
his scheme, or force, or whatever he likes to call his self- 
acting machinery, take a single step towards doing the busi- 
ness, without calling in other forces, of which every one 
required creating by some “ immaterial Reality” or power 
strong enough to influence all the matter in the universe. 
And it would be absurd to talk of such a power doing all that 
without designing it, or making laws of nature in a hap-hazard, 
blundering sort of way. 
Indeed it is one of the characteristics of the laws of 
nature that they have no mistakes, and never want amending, 
as all human laws do constantly. You may say that they 
sometimes produce failures — imperfect or defective creatures 
below their normal type, and some too bad too live. But 
that is only the old argument again in other words, that an 
omnipotent Creator would have made everything perfect. 
But, granting that opinion to be a priori probable, or worth 
something in the balancing of probabilities, it comes to very 
little when weighed against the innumerable facts which tend 
to prove design ; for it is only one guess against the necessary 
inference from those facts. Moreover, occasional failures in 
individuals no more prove bad design than occasional failures 
in any machine or fabric prove it to have been ill-designed, 
though it may have been ill-made. Where is the contrivance 
in all nature which we could improve, consistently with the 
general laws of nature, which laws no one can be so absurd 
as to fancy that he could mend, or guess at the consequences 
of any attempt to do so ? 
Allowing as much gradual improvement as you like by bio- 
logical Evolution, or the creation of small — or large — changes 
adapted to changing circumstances, each creature has somehow 
come to be as well contrived as possible for its own work. And 
I suppose we may say the same of every organ for the time, 
though they may have improved in time, owing to causes 
which are the very things that want explaining, either by a 
creative power or by whatever else unbelievers in one can 
invent, without merely calling them i{ unfathomable mys- 
teries” : which only means that they require a Creator. 
Professor Clifford perhaps set the fashion of saying that 
the human eye is so far from being the wonderful and perfect 
instrument that Paley and others had made out, that it is full 
of defects. I never could find that he had invented a superior 
y 2 
Guessing 
what a Crea- 
tor would do 
is useless. 
