88 NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



fingers of the image ; and to make any obscurity, 

 or difficulty, or controversy in the doctrine of 

 magnetism, an objection to our knowledge or our 

 certainty, concerning the contrivance, or the marks 

 of contrivance, displayed in the automaton, would 

 be exactly the same thing as it is to make our ig- 

 norance (w^hich we acknowledge,) of the cause of 

 nervous agency, or even of the substance and 

 structure of the nerves themselves, a ground of 

 question or suspicion as to the reasoning which 

 "we institute concerning the mechanical part of 

 our frame. That an animal is a machine is a 

 proposition neither correctly true nor wholly false. 

 The distinction w^hich we have been discussing 

 will serve to show how far the comparison, which 

 this expression implies, holds ; and wherein it 

 fails. And w^hether the distinction be thought of 

 importance or not, it is certainly of importance to 

 remember, that there is neither truth nor justice 

 in endeavouring to bring a cloud over our under- 

 standings, or a distrust into our reasonings upon 

 this subject, by suggesting that we know nothing 

 of voluntary motion, of irritability, of the princi- 

 ple of life, of sensation, of animal heat, upon all 

 which the animal functions depend ; for, our ig- 

 norance of these parts of the animal frame con- 

 cerns not at all our knowledge of the mechanical 

 parts of the same frame. I contend, therefore, 

 that there is mechanism in animals ; that this me- 

 chanism is as properly such, as it is in machines 

 made by art ; that this mechanism is intelligible 



