clude, either that everything performed in the course of nature is absolutely necessary-the unavoidable result of its simperative and insuperable laws, or that the artificer who impels her various oper

writing a single page of the book of our formidable opponent. I would recommend it to all you, who are disposed to avail yourselves of your reason and acquire instruction, to read the following eloquent though dangerous passage fromations is destitute of plan, of power, of the System of Nature. (Part II., chap. V., p. 153, &c.)

constancy, of skill, and of goodness.

"Man, who considers himself the master-work of the divinity, supplies us more readily and completely than any other production, with evidence of the incapacity or malignity of his pretended author. In this being, possessed of feeling, intuition, and reason, which considers itself as the perpetual object of divine partiality, and forms its God on the model of itself, we see a machine more changeable, more frail, more liable to derangement from its extraordinary complication, than that of the coarsest and grossest beings. Beasts which are destitute of our mental powers and acquirements, plants which merely vegetate, stones which are unendowed with sensation, are, in many respects,

"It is contended, that animals furnish us with a convincing evidence that there is some powerful cause of their existence; the admirable adaptation of their different parts, mutually receiving and conferring aid towards accomplishing their functions, and maintaining in health and vigour the entire being, announce to us an artificer uniting power to wisdom. Of the power of nature, it is impossible for us to doubt; she produces all the animals that we see by the help of combinations of that matter, which is in incessant action; the adaptation of the parts of these animals is the result of the necessary laws of their nature, and of their combination. When the adaptation ceases, the animal is ne-beings far more favoured than man. They cessarily destroyed. What then becomes of the wisdom, the intelligence, or the goodness of that alleged cause, to which was ascribed all the honour of this boasted adaptation. Those animals of so wonderful a structure as to be pronounced the works of an immutable God, do not they undergo incessant changes; and do not they end in decay and destruction? Where are the wisdom, the goodness, the foresight, the immutability of an artificer, whose sole object appears to be to derange and destroy the springs of those machines which are proclaimed to be master-pieces of his power and skill? If this God can act no otherwise than thus, he is neither free nor omnipotent. If his will changes, he is not immutable. If he permit machines, which he has endowed with sensibility, to experience pain, he is deficient in goodness. If he has been unable to render his productions solid and durable, he is deficient in skill. Perceiving as we do the decay and ruin not only of all animals but of all the other works of deity, we cannot but inevitably con

are, at least, exempt from distress of mind, from the tortures of thought, and corrosions of care, to which the latter is a victim. Who would not prefer being a mere unintelligent animal, or a senseless stone, when his thoughts revert to the irreparable loss of an object dearly beloved? Would it not be infinitely more desirable to be an inanimate mass, than the gloomy votary and victim of superstition, trembling under the present yoke of his diabolical deity, and anticipating infinite torments in a future existence? Beings, destitute of sensation, life, memory, and thought, experience no affliction from the idea of what is past, present, or to come; they do not believe there is any danger of incurring eternal torture for inaccurate reasoning; which is believed, however, by many of those favoured beings who maintain that the great architect of the world has created the universe for themselves.

"Let us not be told that we have no idea of a work without having that of the artificer distinguished from the work.

as having no existence for a being who can scarcely see to the distance of his own feet; the ideal power which inhabits them can never be represented to my mind, unless when my imagination combines at random the fantastic colours which it is always forced to employ in the world on which I am. In this case, I shall merely reproduce in idea what my senses have previously actually perceived; and that God, which I, as it were, compel myself to distinguish from nature, and to place beyond her circuit, will ever, in opposition to all my efforts, necessarily withdraw within it.

Nature is not a work: She has always existed of herself. Every process takes place in her bosom. She is an immense manufactory, provided with materials, and she forms the instruments by which she acts: all her works are effects of her own energy, and of agents or causes which she frames, contains, and impels. Eternal, uncreated elements-elements indestructible, ever in motion, and combining in exquisite and endless diversity, originate all the beings and all the phenomena that we behold; all the effects, good or evil, that we feel; the order or disorder which we distinguish, merely by different modes in which they affect our- “It will be observed and insisted "pon selves; and, in a word, all those wonders by some, that if a statue or a watch were which excite our meditation and confound shown to a savage who had never seen our reasoning. These elements, in order them, he would inevitably acknowledge to effect objects thus comprehensive and that they were the productions of some important, require nothing beyond their intelligent agent, more powerful and inown properties, individual or combined, genious than himself; and hence it will and the motion essential to their very be inferred, that we are equally bound to existence; and thus preclude the neces-acknowledge that the machine of the unisity of recurring to an unknown artificer, in order to arrange, mould, combine, pre- { serve, and dissolve them. "But, even admitting for a moment,perior to our own. that it is impossible to conceive of the "I answer, in the first place, that we universe without an artificer who formed cannot possibly doubt either the great it, and who preserves and watches over power or the great skill of nature: we his work, where shall we place that arti- admire her skill as often as we are surficer? shall he be within or without theprised by the extended, varied, and comuniverse? is he matter or motion? or is he mere space, nothingness, vacuity? In each of these cases, he will either be nothing, or he will be comprehended in nature, and subjected to her laws. If he is in nature, I think I see in her only matter in motion, and cannot but thence conclude, that the agent impelling her is corporeal and material, and that he is consequently liable to dissolution. If this agent is out of nature, then I have no idea of what place he can occupy, nor of an immaterial being, nor of the manner in which a spirit, without extension, can operate upon the matter from which it is separated. Those unknown tracts of space which imagination has placed beyond the visible world, may be considered

verse, that man, that the phenomena of nature, are the productions of an agent, whose intelligence and power are far su

{plicated effects which we find in those of her works which we take the pains to investigate; she is not, however, either more or less skilful in any one of her works than in the rest. We no more comprehend how she could produce a stone or a piece of metal, than how she could produce a head organised like that of Newton. We call that man skilful who can perform things which we are unable to perform ourselves. Nature can perform everything; and when anything exists, it is a proof that she was able to make it. Thus, it is only in relation to ourselves that we ever judge nature to be skilful: we compare it in those cases with curselves; and, as we possess a quality which we call intelligence, by the

aid of which we produce works, in which we display our skill, we thence conclude, that the works of nature which must excite our astonishment and admiration, are not in fact hers, but the productions of an artificer, intelligent like ourselves, and whose intelligence we proportion, in our minds, to the degree of astonishment excited in us by his works; that is, in fact, to our own weakness and ignorance." See the reply to these arguments under the articles ATHEISM and GOD, and in the following section, written long before the "System of Nature."

SECTION II.

If a clock is not made in order to tell the time of the day, I will then admit that final causes are nothing but chimeras, and be content to go by the name of a final-cause-finder;-in plain language, fool to the end of my life.

tends in vain, that the tides were attached to the ocean to enable ships to enter more easily into their ports, and to preserve the water from corruption: he might just as probably and successfully have urged, that legs were made to wear boots, and noses to bear spectacles.

In order to satisfy ourselves of the truth of a final cause, in any particular instance, it is necessary that the effect produced should be uniform and invariably in time and place. Ships have not existed in all times and upon all seas; accordingly, it cannot be said that the ocean was made for ships. It is impossible not to perceive how ridiculous it would be to maintain that nature had toiled on from the very beginning of time to adjust herself to the inventions of our fortuitous and arbitrary arts, all of which are of so late a date in their discovery; but it is perfectly clear that if noses were not made All the parts, however, of that great for spectacles, they were made for smellmachine the world, seem made for eaching, and there have been noses ever since other. Some philosophers affect to de- there were men. ride final causes, which were rejected, they tell us, by Epicurus and Lucretius. But it seems to me, that Epicurus and Lucretius rather merit the derision. They tell you that the eye is not made to see; but that, since it was found out that eyes were capable of being used for that purpose, to that purpose they have been applied. According to them, the mouth is not formed to speak and eat, nor the stomach to digest, nor the heart to receive the blood from the veins and impel it through the arteries, nor the feet to walk, nor the ears to hear. Yet, at the same time, these very shrewd and consistent persons admitted, that tailors made garments to clothe them, and masons built houses to lodge them; and thus ventured to deny to nature-the great existence, the universal intelligence-what they conceded to the most insignificant artificers employed by themselves.

The doctrine of final causes ought certainly to be preserved from being abused. We have already remarked that M. le Prieur, in the Spectator of Nature, con

In the same manner, hands, instead of being bestowed for the sake of gloves, are visibly destined for all those uses to which the metacarpus, the phalanx of the fingers, and the movements of the circular muscle of the wrist, render them applicable by us.

Cicero, who doubted everything else, had no doubt about final causes.

It appears particularly difficult to suppose that those parts of the human frame, by which the perpetuation of the species is conducted, should not, in fact, have been intended and destined for that purpose, from their mechanism so truly admirable, and the sensation which nature has connected with it more admirable still. Epicurus would be at least obliged to ad{mit that pleasure is divine, and that that pleasure is a final cause, in consequence of which beings, endowed with sensibility, but who could never have communicated it to themselves, have been incessantly introduced into the world as others have passed away from it.

This philosopher, Epicurus, was a great man for the age in which he lived.

SECTION III.

He saw that Descartes denied, what Gassendi affirmed, and what Newton demonstrated that motion cannot exist without It would appear that a man must be a vacuum. He conceived the necessity supposed to have lost his senses, before of atoms to serve as constituent parts of he can deny that stomachs are made for invariable species. These are philoso- digestion, eyes to see, and ears to hear. phical ideas. Nothing, however, was On the other hand, a man must have more respectable than the morality of a singular partiality for final causes, to genuine Epicureans; it consisted in se-assert that stone was made for building questration from public affairs, which houses, and that silk-worms are produced are incompatible with wisdom, and in in China that we may wear satins in friendship, without which, life is but a Europe. burden. But as to the rest of the philo- But, it is urged, if God has evidently sophy of Epicurus, it appears not to be done one thing by design, he has then more admissible than the grooved or tu- § done all things by design. It is ridicu bular matter of Descartes. It is, as it lous to admit providence in the one case appears to me, wilfully to shut the eyes and to deny it in the others. Everything and the understanding, and to maintain that is done was forseen, was arranged. that there is no design in nature; and if There is no arrangement without an obthere is design, there is an intelligent ject, no effect without a cause; all, therecause there exists a God. fore, is equally the result, the produce of Some object to us the irregularities of a final cause it is therefore, as correct our globe, the volcanoes, the plains of{to say that noses were made to bear specmoving sands, some small mountains swallowed up in the ocean, others raised by earthquakes, &c. But does it follow from the naves of your chariot wheels taking fire, that your chariot was not made expressly for the purpose of conveying you from one place to another?

The chains of mountains which crown both hemispheres, and more than six hundred rivers which flow from the foot of these rocks towards the sea; the various streams that swell these rivers in their cause, after fertilising the fields through which they pass; the innumerable fountains which spring from the same source, which supply necessary refreshment, and growth, and beauty to animal and vegetable life; all this appears no more to result from a fortuitous concourse and an obliquity of atoms, than the retina which receives the rays of light, or the chrystalline humour which refracts it, or the drum of the ear which admits sounds, or the circulation of the blood in our veins, the systole and diastole of the heart, the regulating principle of the machine of life.

tacles, and fingers to be adorned with rings, as to say that the ears were formed to hear sounds, the eyes to receive light.

All that this objection amounts to, in my opinion, is, that everything is the result, nearer or more remote, of a general final cause; that everything is the consequence of eternal laws.

When the effects are invariably the same in all times and places, and when these uniform effects are independent of the beings to which they attach, then there is visibly a final cause.

All animals have eyes and see; all have ears and hear; all have a mouth with which they eat; a stomach, or something similar, by which they digest their food; all have suitable means for expelling the fæces; all have the organs requisite for the continuation of their species; and these natural gifts perform their regular course and process without any application or intermixture of art. Here are final causes clearly esta {blished; and to deny a truth so universal would be a perversion of the faculty of reason.