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Updated: May 20, 2025
Yet its real significance is precisely its thorough applicability to the contemporary state of opinion. Beauchamp's definition coincides with Paley's. The coincidence was inevitable. Utilitarians both in ethical and philosophical questions start from the same assumptions as Paley, and the Paley doctrine gave the pith of the dominant theology.
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.
Yet, if it is admitted and of this, even in Paley's days, there was a strong analogical presumption that the phenomena of life are throughout their history as much subject to law as are any other phenomena whatsoever, that the method of the divine government, supposing such to exist, is the same here as elsewhere; then nothing can be clearer than that any amount of observable adaptation of means to ends within this class of phenomena cannot afford any different kind of evidence of design than is afforded by any other class of phenomena whatsoever.
The argument from Design, as presented by Mill, is merely a resuscitation of it as presented by Paley. True it is that the logical penetration of the former enabled him to perceive that the latter had "put the case much too strongly;" although, even here, he has failed to see wherein Paley's error consisted.
Finally he did take down "Paley's Evidences," and seated himself in the big armchair that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids half closed themselves in sign of revery. This was his third charge this Octavius which they both knew they were going to dislike so much.
Ceeley's Account of the Puerperal Fever at Aylesbury. "Lancet," 1835. Dr. Ramsbotham's Lecture. "London Medical Gazette," 1835. Mr. Yates Ackerly's Letter in the same Journal, 1838. Mr. Ingleby on Epidemic Puerperal Fever. "Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal," 1838. Mr. Paley's Letter. "London Medical Gazette," 1839. Remarks at the Medical and Chirurgical Society. "Lancet," 1840. Dr.
Gerald, upon whom solid food seemed to have the effect that undiluted alcohol has upon ordinary folk, was stentoriously engaged with Mr Donkin in what a student of Paley's Evidences would have described as "A Contest of Opposite Improbabilities" concerning his election experiences. Lastly, I turned to Dolly and Robin.
Had those he wrote to been then suffering, surely the apostle would have said: "When any man suffers ... let him not be ashamed." The whole question of the authenticity of the canonical books will be challenged later, and the weakness of this division of Paley's evidences will then be more fully apparent. Meanwhile we subjoin Lardner's view of these passages.
The reasoning by which Socrates, in Xenophon's hearing, confuted the little atheist Aristodemus, is exactly the reasoning of Paley's Natural Theology. Socrates makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch.
I do not quote the rest of the passage; first, because you, I doubt not, know it as well as I; and next, in order that if any one shall read these lines who has not read Paley's Evidences, he may be stirred up to look the passage out for himself, and so become acquainted with a great book and a great mind. Of the orthodoxy of the book it is not, of course, a private clergyman's place to judge.
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