Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in. THE ABGUMENT OF DESIGN The marks of design in nature reveal to us its intelligent author. For the same reason that we recognize an intelligent cause in the case of countless products of human agency whose particular origin and authorship we know not, we infer an intelligent cause of the objects of nature. In them we discern equal evidence of an end secured by the selection and combination of means adapted to accomplish it. The signs of forethought, preconception, purpose, are just as manifest in what we style the works of nature as they are in the works character man- This mode of reasoning is often mentrfe- considered an argument from analogy, sign. -ye sometimes apply the term " analogy " to a merely figurative likeness which the imagination suggests ; as when we speak of the " analogy " between a rushing stream and the rapid utterance of an excited orator. This is the language of poetry. But when we have always found that certain properties in an animal are united with a given characteristic — for example, speed — we expect,wherever we meet the same collection of properties, to find in their company this additional quality. This we look for with a certain degree of confidence even when no special connection between such properties and their associate has yet been detected. This is an argument from an- It is an in- . ductive argu- alogy. ±ut the argument 01 design, as J. S. Mill has pointed out, is a genuine instance of inductive reasoning. " The design argument," says Mill, "is not drawn from mere resemblance in nature to the work of human intelligence, but from the special character of this resemblance. The circumstances in which it is alleged that the world resembles the works of man are not circumstances taken at random, but are particular instan...