34 
PLANTS AND ANIMALS. 
without perceiving, as we proceed, any alteration whatever 
in the terms of the comparison. The rational animal does 
not produce its offspring with more certainty or success 
than the irrational animal; a man than a quadruped, a 
quadruped than a bird; nor (for we may follow the grada¬ 
tion through its whole scale) a bird than a plant; nor a 
plant than a watch, a piece of dead mechanism, would do, 
upon the supposition w r hich has already so often been re¬ 
peated. Rationality therefore has nothing to do in the 
business. If an account must be given of the contrivance 
which we observe; if it be demanded, whence arose either 
the contrivance by which the young animal is produced, 
or the contrivance manifested in the young animal itself, it 
is not from the reason of the parent that any such account 
can be drawn. He is the cause of his offspring in the same 
sense as that in which a gardener is the cause of the tulip 
which grows upon his parterre, and in no other. We ad¬ 
mire the flower; we examine the plant; we perceive the 
conduciveness of many of its parts to their end and office; 
we observe a provision for its nourishment, growth, pro¬ 
tection, and fecundity; but we never think of the gardener 
in all this. We attribute nothing of this to his agency; 
yet it may still be true, that without the gardener we 
should not have had the tulip: just so it is with the suc¬ 
cession of animals even of the highest order. For the 
contrivance discovered in the structure of the thing pro¬ 
duced, we want a contriver. The parent is not that contri¬ 
ver. His consciousness decidesffiat question. He is in total 
ignorance why that which is produced took its present form 
rather than any other. It is for him only to be astonished 
by the effect. We can no more look therefore to the intel¬ 
ligence of the parent animal for what we are in search of, 
a cause of relation, and of subserviency of parts to their use, 
which relation and subserviency we see in the procreated 
body, than we can refer the internal conformation of an 
acorn to the intelligence of the oak from which it dropped, 
or the structure of the watch to the intelligence of the 
watch which produced it; there being no difference, as far 
as argument is concerned, between an intelligence which 
is not exerted, and an intelligence which does not exist. 
