with transport the butterflies, the insects, the polypi, and the organized
atoms, in which you think you discern the greatness of your God. All these
things will not prove the existence of God; they will prove only, that you
have not just ideas of the immense variety of matter, and of the effects,
producible by its infinitely diversified combinations, that constitute the
universe. They will prove only your ignorance of nature; that you have no
idea of her powers, when you judge her incapable of producing a multitude
of forms and beings, of which your eyes, even with the assistance of
microscopes, never discern but the smallest part. In a word, they will
prove, that, for want of knowing sensible agents, or those possible
to know, you find it shorter to have recourse to a word, expressing an
inconceivable agent.

39.

We are gravely and repeatedly told, that, _there is no effect without
a cause_; that, _the world did not make itself_. But the universe is
a cause, it is not an effect; it is not a work; it has not been made,
because it is impossible that it should have been made. The world has
always been; its existence is necessary; it is its own cause. Nature,
whose essence is visibly to act and produce, requires not, to discharge
her functions, an invisible mover, much more unknown than herself. Matter
moves by its own energy, by a necessary consequence of its heterogeneity.
The diversity of motion, or modes of mutual action, constitutes alone the
diversity of matter. We distinguish beings from one another only by the
different impressions or motions which they communicate to our organs.

40.

You see, that all is action in nature, and yet pretend that nature, by
itself, is dead and without power. You imagine, that this all, essentially
acting, needs a mover! What then is this mover? It is a spirit; a being
absolutely incomprehensible and contradictory. Acknowledge then, that
matter acts of itself, and cease to reason of your spiritual mover,
who has nothing that is requisite to put it in action. Return from
your useless excursions; enter again into a real world; keep to _second
causes_, and leave to divines their _first cause_, of which nature has no
need, to produce all the effects you observe in the world.

41.

It can be only by the diversity of impressions and effects, which bodies
make upon us, that we feel them; that we have perceptions and ideas
of them; that we distinguish one from anothe