CHAELES BABBAGE. 175 



its originality is obvious, and its ingenuity undeniable. That it was 

 satisfactory to a mind whose reach was as wide and whose logic as 

 consecutive as that of Charles Babbage, is sufficient to demand for it 

 fair consideration-. He evidently believed it ; urged it upon other minds 

 upon the same level with his own, and received no answers that detected 

 in it a fallacy or showed it to be a sophism. 



There is surpassing interest in watching the workings of a great mind 

 in honest search after truth. There are no volumes of the fathers ; no ser- 

 mons of Laurin or Bossuet ; no essays of Fenelon or Pascal ; no per- 

 sonal narrative of Arnauld, Frangoise de Sales, de Eance, or of the 

 saints of Port Eoyal ; no memoirs of the pietists of France, or martyrs of 

 England ', no lives of foreign missionaries, Protestant or Catholic, who 

 gave their all, even to death, to propagate what to them was Divine that 

 in our apprehension can confine the attention or challenge the judg- 

 ment of a sincere, intelligent inquirer after truth, like the thirtieth chapter 

 in the " Passages from the Life of a Philosopher." On« sees in it no iav- 

 orite opinion to be defended ; no peculiar error to be denounced ; no class, 

 no creed, no caste to be built up ; no prejudice to be favored nor tradi- 

 tion exempted from trial ; nothing, in fact, but the record of the thoughts 

 of a great mind in honest pursuit of truth. It would be marred by quo- 

 tations, and its life deadened by condensation ; though it does not 

 traverse the ground of more modern skepticism, and deals only with 

 the old positions of the encyclopedists and Hume, it assumes a position 

 in regard to Divine revelation which, if not impregnable, has never yet 

 been overturned. 



We cannot easily resist the temptation to quote a few of his clear and 

 vigorous remarks from the chajrter in question. Speaking of an ex- 

 amination of the Creator's works as one of the sources of our knowledge 

 of His existence, Babbage says : 



" Unlike transmitted testimony, which is weakened at every stage, 

 its evidence derives confirmation from the progress of the individual 

 as well as from the advancement of the knowledge of the race. 



"Almost all thinking men who have studied the laws which govern 

 the animate and inanimate world around us, agree that the belief in the 

 existence of one Supreme Creator, possessed of infinite wisdom and 

 power, is open to far less difficulties than the supposition of the absence 

 of au3' cause, or the existence of a plurality of causes. 



" In the works of the Creator, ever open to our examination, we possess a 

 firm basis on which to raise the superstructure of an enlightened creed. 

 The more man inquires into the laws which regulate the material uni- 

 verse, the more he is convinced that all its varied forms arise from the 

 action of a few simple principles. These principles themselves converge, 

 with accelerating force, toward some still more comprehensive law 

 to which all matter seems to be submitted. Simple as that law may 

 possibly be, it must be remembered that it is only one among an in- 

 finite number of simple laws; that each of these laws has consequences 



