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Updated: May 20, 2025
This is certainly the kind of theory which was in favour at the end of the last century, and found expression in works like Paley's Evidences. The world has undergone a great change since then. A new and far- reaching philosophy is gradually displacing the old. The Christian sees that evolution is as much a law of religion as of nature.
In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end; on the ground, that the only cause we know of, competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time, is a contriving intelligence adapting the means directly to that end.
This could not have been Paley's revised meaning. Consequently, had he been pressed by opposition, it would have come out, that by test he meant only speculative test: a very harmless doctrine certainly, but useless and impertinent to any purpose of his system. The reader may catch our meaning in the following illustration.
If, that is, we asked what were the real roots of the religious zeal of Wilberforce and the Evangelicals, or of the philanthropists with whom even James Mill managed to associate on friendly terms, it would be the height of injustice to assume that they tried to do good simply from fear of hell and hope of heaven, or that their belief in Christianity was due to a study of Paley's Evidences.
There are many other little details in the neighbourhood of these piers, all confirming Mr Paley's discovery with respect to these contemplated towers, one at any rate of which he thinks was actually erected. The pillars are cylindrical with numerous attached shafts.
However, I am disposed to follow you, and will now endeavour to shew the probability of the gospel's having been written even before the destruction of Jerusalem. The following passages are quoted from Paley's evidences from page 106 and on
BOSWELL. The 'eloquent historian' was Gibbon. See Paley's Principles, ed. 1786, p. 395. See ante, i. 353, note 1. Ovid, Ars Amatoria, iii. 121. 'This facile temper of the beauteous sex Great Agamemnon, brave Pelides proved. These two lines follow the four which Boswell quotes. Agis, act iv. Agis, a tragedy, by John Home. See ante, p. 27. A misprint, I suppose, for designing.
You had better read the text without the notes; they are diffuse, and tend to distract the attention. Now and then they contain some useful explanation. After you have read the author, you will, I think, with more pleasure read the notes and remarks in course by themselves. You expressed a curiosity to peruse Paley's Philosophy of Natural History. Judge Hobart has it.
Hence I conceive that Mill is entirely wrong when he says of Paley's argument, "It surpasses analogy exactly as induction surpasses it," because "the instances chosen are particular instances of a circumstance which experience shows to have a real connection with an intelligent origin the fact of conspiring to an end."
To the many partial designs which Paley's Natural Theology points out, and which still remain what they were, the doctrine of Evolution adds the design of a perpetual progress. Things are so arranged that animals are perpetually better adapted to the life they have to live.
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