10 
STATE OF THE ARGUMENT. 
immediately by the hand of an artificer, yet doth not this 
alteration in any-wise affect the inference, that an artificer 
had been originally employed and concerned in the pro¬ 
duction. The argument from design remains as it was. 
Marks of design and contrivance are no more accounted 
for now than they were before. In the same thing, we 
may ask for the cause of different properties. We may 
ask for the cause of the color of a body, of its hardness, of 
its heat; and these causes may be all different. We are 
now asking for the cause of that subserviency to a use, 
that relation to an end, which we have remarked in the 
watch before us. No answer is given to this question by 
telling us that a preceding watch produced it. There can¬ 
not be design without a designer; contrivance, without a 
contriver; order, without choice; arrangement, without 
anything capable of arranging; subserviency and relation 
to a purpose, without that which could intend a purpose; 
means suitable to an end, and executing their office in 
accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been 
contemplated, or the means accommodated to it. Arrange¬ 
ment, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, 
relation of instruments to a use, imply the presence of in¬ 
telligence and mind. No one, therefore, can rationally be¬ 
lieve, that the insensible, inanimate watch, from which the 
watch before us issued, was the proper cause of the me¬ 
chanism we so much admire in it;—could be truly said to 
have constructed the instrument, disposed its parts, assign 
ed their office, determined their order, action, and mutual 
dependency, combined their several motions into one re¬ 
sult, and that also a result connected with the utilities of 
other beings. All these properties, therefore, are as much 
unaccounted for as they were before. 
IV. Nor is anything gained by running the difficulty 
farther back, i. e. by supposing the watch before us to have 
been produced from another watch, that from a former, 
and so on indefinitely. Our going back ever so far brings 
us no nearer to the least degree of satisfaction upon the 
subject. Contrivance is still unaccounted for. We still 
want a contriver. A designing mind is neither supplied 
by this supposition, nor dispensed with. If the difficulty 
were diminished the farther we went back, by going back 
indefinitely we might exhaust it. And this is the only 
case to which this sort of reasoning applies. Where there 
is a tendency, or, as we increase the number of terms, a 
continual ,approach towards a limit, there , by supposing the 
number of terms to be what is called infinite, we may con- 
