Blog 1

   This blog post will consist of my interpretations and thoughts on “Section V: Concerning our Reasoning…” by Francis Hutcheson. This essay took me quite some time to drudge through, as the 18^th century writing style was often cryptic. However, after some time and several re-readings of paragraphs, I was able to gather what seemed to me to be Hutcheson’s main notion. This notion being that humans’ share a sense of beauty, an appreciation for regularity, uniformity, and consistency, of which can never come to existence by randomness but by a designer. One sentence that somewhat summarizes this notion sits in the third paragraph when Hutcheson proclaims,” that wherever there is any Regularity in the disposition of a System capable of many other , there must have been Design in the Cause; and the Force of this Evidence increases, according to the Multiplicity of Parts imploy’d”(Hutcheson, Concerning).
   Hutcheson’s thesis presents a very interesting but dated argument. He uses the majority of the writing to defend his thesis through legitimate mathematical reasoning, however his conclusion many would debate. To summarize, Hutcheson claims that the regularity or “beauty” we see in the natural world is extremely mathematically improbable, therefore, this regularity could not come to existence by chance, but by design.  Today, most scientific thinkers would of course agree that the natural world’s regularity and beauty was not brought about by chance at all, but through a selective process called evolution. In fairness to Hutcheson, he presented a very logical argument at the time he made it, as the theory of evolution did not come to presence until after Hutcheson’s death.
   I think Hutcheson makes a very respectable claim, given the knowledge of the world he had at the time, as there seemed to be little alternatives. In terms of his work refuting or clashing with Mandeville’s, Fable of the Bees, I think some disagreements occur. To summarize, I think Mandeville gives mankind little credit and faith, whereas Hutcheson would argue that man naturally possesses an innate ability to see beauty and reason. One could then assume that Hutcheson would argue that this natural sense lead humanity to organizing itself into a civil society as it would be the reasonable action to take.