If a
man wants to shoot a hare which is in a certain field, he does not
procure thousands of guns, surround the field, and cause them all to be
fired off; or if he wants a house to live in, he does not build a whole
town and abandon to weather and decay all the houses but one. If he did
either of these things we should say he was mad or amazingly
unintelligent; his actions certainly would not be held to indicate a
powerful mind, expert in adapting means to ends. But these are the sort
of things that nature does. Her wastefulness in the propagation of life
is reckless. For the production of one life she sacrifices innumerable
germs. The "end" is achieved in one case out of thousands; the rule is
destruction and failure. If intelligence had anything to do with this
bungling process, it would be an intelligence infinitely low. And the
finished product, if regarded as a work of design, points to
incompetence in the designer. Take the human eye. An illustrious man of
science (Helmholtz) said, "If an optician sent it to me as an
instrument, I should send it back with reproaches for the carelessness
of his work and demand the return of my money. Darwin showed how the
phenomena might be explained as events not brought about
[183] intentionally, but due to exceptional concurrences of
circumstances.
The phenomena of nature are a system of things which co-exist and follow
each other according to invariable laws.
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