CHAPTER II - Argument in favour of Design from the changing of Laws in Natural Events

Summary

The estimate we form of the intellectual capacity of our race, is founded on an examination of those productions which have resulted from the loftiest flights of individual genius, or from the accumulated labours of generations of men, by whose long-continued exertions a body of science has been raised up, surpassing in its extent the creative powers of any individual, and demanding for its development a length of time, to which no single life extends.

The estimate we form of the Creator of the visible world rests ultimately on the same foundation. Conscious that we each of us employ, in our own productions, means intended to accomplish the objects at which we aim, and tracing throughout the actions and inventions of our fellow-creatures the same intention,—judging also, of their capacity by the fit selection they make of the means by which they work, we are irresistibly led, when we contemplate the natural world, to attempt to trace each existing fact presented to our senses to some precontrived arrangement, itself perhaps the consequence of a yet more general law; and where the most powerful aids by which we can assist our limited faculties fail in enabling us to detect such connexions, we still, and not the less, believe that a more extended inquiry, or higher powers, would enable us to discover them.

The larger the number of consequences resulting from any law, and the more they are foreseen, the greater the knowledge and intelligence we ascribe to the being by which it was ordained.