Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Read Darwin's Dangerous Idea for Free Online

Book: Read Darwin's Dangerous Idea for Free Online
Authors: Daniel C. Dennett
effects.
    facts themselves and their artificers?" (Gjertsen 1989, p. 199).

    Hume's Close Encounter 31
    30 TELL ME WHY

    been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was ideas in a human mind, we see, by an unknown, inexplicable economy, struck out: Much labour lost: Many fruitless trials made: And a slow, arrange themselves so as to form the plan of a watch or house. Experience, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages of world-therefore, proves, that there is an original principle of order in mind, not in making. (Pt. V.]
    matter" (Pt. II).
    Note that the Argument from Design depends on an inductive inference: When Philo presents this fanciful alternative, with its breathtaking anticipa-where there's smoke, there's fire; and where there's design, there's mind. But tions of Darwin's insight, he doesn't take it seriously except as a debating foil this is a dubious inference, Philo observes: human intelligence is to Cleanthes' vision of an all-wise Artificer. Hume uses it only to make a point about what he saw as the limitations on our knowledge: "In such no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe, as well subjects, who can determine, where the truth; nay, who can conjecture where as heat or cold, attraction or repulsion, and a hundred others, which fall the probability, lies; amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be under daily observation__ But can a conclusion, with any propriety, be proposed, and a still greater number which may be imagined" (Pt. V).
    transferred from parts to the whole?... From observing the growth of a Imagination runs riot, and, exploiting that fecundity, Philo ties Cleanthes up hair, can we learn any thing concerning the generation of a man?...
    What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we in knots, devising weird and comical variations on Cleanthes' own hy-call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole potheses, defying Cleanthes to show why his own version should be pre-universe?... Admirable conclusion! Stone, wood, brick, iron, brass have ferred. "Why may not several Deities combine in contriving and framing a not, at this time, in this minute globe of earth, an order or arrangement world?... And why not become a perfect anthropomorphite? Why not assert without human art and contrivance: Therefore the universe could not the Deity or Deities to be corporeal, and to have eyes, a nose, mouth, ears, originally attain its order and arrangement, without something similar to etc.?" (Pt. V). At one point, Philo anticipates the Gaia hypothesis: the human art. [Pt. II.]
    universe
    Besides, Philo observes, if we put mind as the first cause, with its "unknown, bears a great resemblance to an animal or organized body, and seems inexplicable economy," this only postpones the problem: actuated with a like principle of life and motion. A continual circulation of
    We are still obliged to mount higher, in order to find the cause of this matter in it produces no disorder ___The world, therefore, I infer, is an cause, which you had assigned as satisfactory and conclusive ___ How animal, and the Deity is the SOUL of the world, actuating it and actuated therefore shall we satisfy ourselves concerning the cause of that Being, by it. [Pt. VI.]
    whom you suppose the Author of nature, or, according to your system of anthropomorphism, the ideal world, into which you trace the material?
    Or perhaps isn't the world really more like a vegetable than an animal?
    Have we not the same reason to trace that ideal world into another ideal world, or new intelligent principle? But if we stop, and go no farther; In like manner as a tree sheds its seed into the neighboring fields, and why go so far? Why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy produces other trees; so the great vegetable, the world, or this planetary ourselves without going on in infinitum? And after all, what satisfaction system, produces within itself

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