It is certainly not my intention to defend the old syllogism:
Every arrangement implies an ordaining intelligence; there is
wonderful order in the world; then the world is the work of an
intelligence. This syllogism, discussed so widely since the days
of Job and Moses, very far from being a solution, is but the
statement of the problem which it assumes to solve. We know
perfectly well what order is, but we are absolutely ignorant of
the meaning of the words Soul, Spirit, Intelligence: how, then,
can we logically reason from the presence of the one to the
existence of the other? I reject, then, even when advanced by
the most thoroughly informed, the pretended proof of the
existence of God drawn from the presence of order in the world; I
see in it at most only an equation offered to philosophy.
Between the conception of order and the affirmation of spirit
there is a deep gulf of metaphysics to be filled up; I am
unwilling, I repeat, to take the problem for the demonstration.
But this is not the point which we are now considering.
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