rEE-SONALITY OF DEITY- 273 



wliich are strictly mechanical, is necessary to its succesy ; 

 what a train it includes of operations and changes one suc- 

 ceeding another, one related to another, one ministering to 

 another ; all advancing by intermediate, and frequently by 

 sensible steps, to their ultimate result. Yet, because the 

 whole of this complicated action is wrapped up in a single 

 term, generation, we are to set it dow^i as an elementary 

 principle ; and to suppose, that when we have resolved the 

 things which we see into this principle, we have sufficiently 

 accounted for their origin, without the necessity of a design- 

 ing, intelligent Creator. The truth is, generation is not a 

 principle, but a inoce^s,. V/e might as well call the casting 

 of metals a principle ; we might, so far as appears to me, as 

 well call spinning and weaving principles ; and then, refer- 

 ring the texture of cloths, the fabric of muslins and calicoes, 

 the patterns of diapers and damasks, to these, as principles, 

 pretend to dispense with intention, thought, and contrivance 

 on the part of the artist ; or to dispense, indeed, with the 

 necessity of any artist at all, either in the manufacturing of 

 the article, or in the fabrication of the machinery by which 

 the manufacture was carried on. 



And, after all, how, or in what sense is it true, that ani- 

 mals produce their like ? A butterfly with a proboscis 

 instead of a mouth, with four wings and six legs, produces a 

 hairy caterpillar with jaws and teeth, and fourteen feet. A 

 frog produces a tadpole. A black beetle with gauze wings 

 and a crusty covering, produces a white, smooth, soft worm ; 

 an ephemeron fly, a cod-bait maggot. These, by a progress 

 through different stages of life and action and enjoyment — ■ 

 and, in each state, provided with implements and organs 

 appropriated to the temporary nature which they bear — 

 arrive at last at the form and fashion of the parent animal. 

 But all this is process, not principle ; and proves, moreover, 

 that the property of animated bodies of producing their like 

 bolongs to them, not as a primordial property, not by any 

 blind necessity in the nature of things, but as the efTeci of 

 12* 



