If a person found a watch in the desert, he would immediately infer the existence of a designer.

It was this flicker that allowed astrophysicists to observe and detect pulsars in the first place, and infer the existence of neutron stars, which remain invisible.

However, the method would not infer the existence of large brown tailless mice, because no mice are known to have both the large and tailless traits.

Reason infers the existence of causes from the existence of effects, without always being able to specify the nature of the causes from the nature of the effects.

Around this time he was sympathetic to historic ideas of structuralism of patterns in nature, but could not go from that to inferring the existence of a designer.