consider the given arrangement good proof of human design. Even so, until I see that natural selection can simulate the designing power of human beings, I may be disposed to regard a given case of apparent design in nature as a fair inductive proof of some great carpenter or watch-maker working there. But the induction, never overwhelming, becomes very weak when I learn that there are so-called physical conditions such as we or chance can produce, which, however, do nevertheless result in things that my eye woidd have called full of design. For then I am led to feel as if I could pass no judgment at all upon concrete cases. Yet only by concrete cases can an empirical hypothesis be proved. Therefore unless a pebble proves design an eye does not prove design.
But design, we hear, is not incompatible with evolution. Of course not. And if there is a designer, who works through evolution, then indeed he shows wonderful foresight and mastery. But the question is, not what is compatible with evolution, but what can be proven from bare experience. And what the modern man has very justly come to see is that mere experience must leave him in utter doubt about what powers, intelligent or not intelligent, are the sources of all our experience. We can find laws; but they take us only a short way. And the more we know about nature, the less inclined we feel to dogmatize on the basis of mere experience about what powers are behind the scenes. They may be intelligent, and they may be what we call in this world of sense mechanical. But as finite powers, given in experience, we men know them solely by
