Paley's Natural Theology (Volume 2)

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The publisher of this book utilises modern printing technologies as well as photocopying processes for reprinting and preserving rare works of literature that are out-of-print or on the verge of becoming lost. This book is one such reprint. Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: he wants to force his fruit, and when his trees require the heat, gives not a more certain evidence of design. So, again, when a male and female sparrow come together, they do not meet to confer upon the expediency of perpetuating their species. As an abstract proposition, they care not the value of a barleycorn whether the species be perpetuated or not: they follow their sensations, and all those consequences ensue which the wisest counsels could have dictated, which the most solicitous care of futurity, which the most anxious care for the sparrow-world could have produced. But how do these consequences ensue 1 The sensations, and the constitution upon which they depend, are as manifestly directed to the purpose which we see fulfilled by them ; and the train of intermediate effects as manifestly laid and planned with a view to that purpose : that is to say, design is as 32' by means of some bodily conformation which secures this re suit; some form of its own parts onswering to those angles, i( such a thing can be conceived: the wonder is only removed from the working of the insect witMht a tool, to its using a tool provi ded for it by the intelligence which had solved the problem of maxima and minima, whence this conformation is a corollary. Again: the loss ot one sense, as the sight, quickens our perceptions through the organs of those senses which remain, as touch and hearing. It is most probable that this effect is produced by the influence of habit, and has no direct connexion with the loss sustained. But habit might have had no such effect, and it might have bluut- ed instead of sharpening; its effect tends to lessen the evil of the loss sustained ; and it produces this advantage just as much as if the compensation had been the direct and immediate consequence of that los...

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