STATE OF THE ARGUMENT. 
9 
I. The first effect would be to increase his admiration 
of the contrivance, and his conviction of the consummate 
skill of "he contriver. Whether he regarded the ob¬ 
ject of t ie contrivance, the distinct apparatus, the intri¬ 
cate, yet in many parts intelligible mechanism, by which 
it was carried on, he would perceive, in this new observa¬ 
tion, nothing but an additional reason for doing what he 
had already done,—for referring the construction of the 
watch to design, and to supreme art. If that construction 
without this property, or, which is the same thing, before 
this property had been noticed, proved intention and art 
to have been employed about it, still more strong would 
the proof appear, when he came to the knowledge of this 
farther property, the crown and perfection of all the rest. 
II. He would reflect, that though the watch before him 
were, in some sense , the maker of the watch which was 
fabricated in the course of its movements, yet it was in a 
very different sense from that in which a carpenter, for 
instance, is the maker of a chair; the author of its con¬ 
trivance, the cause of the relation of its parts to their use. 
With respect to these, the first watch was no cause at all 
to the second: in no such sense as this was it the author 
of the constitution and order, either of the parts which 
the new watch contained, or of the parts by the aid and 
instrumentality of which it was produced. We might pos¬ 
sibly say, but with great latitude of expression, that a 
stream of water ground corn; but no latitude of expres¬ 
sion would allow us to say, no stretch of conjecture could 
lead us to think, that the stream of water built the mill, 
though it were too ancient for us to know who the builder 
was. What the stream of water does in the affair, is 
neither more nor less than this; by the application of an 
unintelligent impulse to a mechanism previously arranged, 
arranged independently of it, and arranged by intelligence, 
an effect is produced, viz. the corn is ground. But the 
effect results from the arrangement. The force of the 
stream cannot be said to be the cause or author of tne 
effect, still less of the arrangement. Understanding and 
plan in the formation of the mill were not the less neces¬ 
sary, for any share which the water has in grinding the 
corn; yet is this share the same as that which the watch 
would have contributed to the production of the new watch, 
upon the supposition assumed in the last section. There¬ 
fore, 
III. Though it be now no longer probable, that the 
individual watch which our observer had found was made 
