276 NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



tliat many miiids are not so indisposed to any thing winch 

 can be offered to them, as they are to the jlatness of being 

 content with common reasons, and, what is most to be 

 lamented, minds conscious of superiority are the most liable 

 to this repugnancy. 



The " suppositions " here alluded to, all agree in one 

 character : they all endeavor to dispense with the necessity 

 in nature of a particular, personal intelligence ; that is to 

 say, with the exertion of an intending, contriving mind, in 

 the structure and formation of the organized constitutions 

 which the world contains. They would resolve all produc- 

 tions mto unconscious energies, of a like kind, in that respect, 

 with attraction, magnetism, electricity, etc., without any 

 thing further. 



In this, the old system of atheism and the new agree. 

 And I much doubt v/hether the new schemes have advance(? 

 any thing upon the old, or done more than changed the terms 

 of the nomenclature. For instance, I could never see tht 

 difference between the antiquated system of atoms, and 

 Buffon's organic molecules. This philosopher, having made 

 a planet by knocking off from the sun a piece of melted glass, 

 in consequence of the stroke of a' comet, and having set it 

 in motion by the same stroke, both round its own axis and 

 the sun, finds his next difficulty to be, how to bring plants 

 and animals upon it. In order to solve this difficulty, we 

 are to suppose the universe replenished with- particles en- 

 dowed with life, but without organization or senses of theii 

 own ; and endowed also with a tendency to marshal them- 

 selves into organized forms. The concourse of these par- 

 ticles, by virtue of this tendency, but without intelligence, 

 will, or direction — for I do not find that any of these quali- 

 ties are ascribed to them — has produced the living forms 

 which we now see. 



Very few of the conjectures which philosophers hazard 

 upon these subjects have more of pretension in them, than 

 the challenging you to show the direct impossibility of the 



