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our ordinary tools and instruments except bungle, unless we 
take pains in our works, and use our intelligence to guide our 
operations. Nor do we ever arrive at perfection in our own 
works, or any approach to it, without the greatest labour and 
most skilful as well as intelligent painstaking. Neither can we 
conceive that life, which appears and disappears in material 
substances, can come from the dead substances themselves 
(and still less from nothing !) without some original living power, 
which must have bestowed it, and which enables it to perform 
the marvellous functions it fulfils. Then as to motion, we know 
but two kinds of it in material things : motion proceeding from 
life or internal energy, and motion produced by external force 
or mechanically. Let us discard the former altogether, as 
already glanced at in our allusion to life, and consider that alone 
which is produced by power applied from without, or external 
force. When we see an object suddenly pass through the air, 
we at once, as rational beings having some experience of natural 
things, conclude either that it is a bird or other animal, moving 
spontaneously by some locomotive power or life within it; or 
that it is some machine, constructed by mechanical skill to 
move artificially in the air, by some kind of mechanism or im- 
planted energy ; or, lastly, that it is something, having no 
capability of locomotion in itself, natural or artificial, projected 
by some living agent or external force, as a stone thrown from 
a sling, or a ball fired from a cannon ; and, in either case, an 
invisible will and an intelligence are necessary to have produced 
such an effect. When I hold a ball in my hand, you know its 
natural tendency is simply to fall down to the earth ; it has no 
power of any other motion, being inanimate, dead matter, in- 
capable of thought or will. Well, then, if you see it moving 
through the sky, what — as a rational being — must you conclude? 
You cannot for a moment think it has moved in that way of 
itself. Do so; and who would believe you sane? Well, then, 
let us raise our thoughts. Instead of a little ball, which we 
ourselves can project in the air, let us turn to the moon, and 
regard its motion round this earth, and say, What must we 
conclude regarding it? That, as the poets have it, it literally 
walks through the clouds of heaven ? But where, then, do we 
find its feet, or trace any symptoms of its functions of locomo- 
tion ? Or what footing can we imagine it has on which to 
tread in the expanse of the firmament ? I leave it boldly in 
the hands of all men ; there is but one rational answer : the 
moon moves in her stated course by some invisible power or 
law, and in accordance with some will, which she herself pos- 
sesses not. If we reflect, we cannot but conclude, that, as the 
motions of our own bodies are produced solely by the life and, 
