38 
APPLICATION OF THE 
tery, or like some singularity in nature, but the happy 
chance of a whole species; nor of one species out of many 
thousand species, with which we are acquainted, but of 
by far the greatest number of all that exist; and that under 
varieties, not casual or capricious, but bearing marks 
of being suited to their respective exigencies:—that all 
this should have taken place, merely because something 
must have occupied those points in every animal’s fore¬ 
head;—or, that all this should be thought to be accounted 
for, by the short answer, “ that whatever was there, must 
have had some form or other,” is too absurd to be made 
more so by any augmentation. We are not contented 
with this answer; we find no satisfaction in it, by way of 
accounting for appearances of organization far short of 
those of the eye, such as we observe in fossil shells, petri¬ 
fied bones, or other substances which bear the vestiges of 
animal or vegetable recrements, but which, either in re¬ 
spect of utility, or of the situation in which they are dis¬ 
covered, may seem accidental enough. It is no way of 
accounting even for these things, to say that the stone, for 
instance, which is shown to us, (supposing the question to 
be concerning a petrification,) must have contained some 
internal conformation or other. Nor does it mend the an¬ 
swer to add, with respect to the singularity of the confor¬ 
mation, that, after the event, it is no longer to be comput¬ 
ed what the chances were against it. This is always to be 
computed, when the question is, whether a useful or imi¬ 
tative conformation be the produce of chance, or not: I de¬ 
sire no greater certainty in reasoning, than that by which 
chance is excluded from the present disposition of the nat¬ 
ural world. Universal experience is against it. What 
does chance ever do for us? In the human body, for in¬ 
stance, chance, i. e. the operation of causes without design, 
may produce a wen, a wart, a mole, a pimple, but never an 
eye. Amongst inanimate substances, a clod, a pebble, a 
liquid drop might be; but never was a watch, a telescope, 
an organized body of any kind, answering a valuable pur¬ 
pose by a complicated mechanism, the effect of chance 
In no assignable instance hath such a thing existed without 
intention somewhere. 
IV. There is another answer, which has the same ef¬ 
fect as the resolving of things into chance; which answer 
would persuade us to believe, that the eye, the animal to 
which it belongs, every other animal, every plant, indeed 
every organized body which we see, are only so many out 
of t V/> oossible varieties and combinations of being, which 
