on of the material elements.
And behold, ye Indians, ye Boudhists, ye Christians, ye Mussulmans!
whence are derived all your opinions on the spirituality of the soul;
behold what was the source of the dreams of Pythagoras and Plato, your
masters, who were themselves but the echoes of another, the last sect of
visionary philosophers, which we will proceed to examine.

VIII. Eighth system. The WORLD-MACHINE: Worship of the Demi-Ourgos, or
Grand Artificer.

"Hitherto the theologians, employing themselves in examining the
fine and subtile substances of ether or the generating fire, had not,
however, ceased to treat of beings palpable and perceptible to the
senses; and theology continued to be the theory of physical powers,
placed sometimes exclusively in the stars, and sometimes disseminated
through the universe; but at this period, certain superficial minds,
losing the chain of ideas which had directed them in their profound
studies, or ignorant of the facts on which they were founded, distorted
all the conclusions that flowed from them by the introduction of a
strange and novel chimera. They pretended that this universe, these
heavens, these stars, this sun, differed in no respect from an ordinary
machine; and applying to this first hypothesis a comparison drawn from
the works of art, they raised an edifice of the most whimsical sophisms.
A machine, said they, does not make itself; it has had an anterior
workman; its very existence proves it. The world is a machine; therefore
it had an artificer.*

* All the arguments of the spiritualists are founded on
this. See Macrobius, at the end of the second book, and
Plato, with the comments of Marcilius Ficinus.

"Here, then, is the Demi-Ourgos or grand artificer, constituted God
autocratical and supreme. In vain the ancient philosophy objected to
this by saying that the artificer himself must have had parents and
progenitors; and that they only added another step to the ladder by
taking eternity from the world, and giving it to its supposed author.
The innovators, not content with this first paradox, passed on to
a second; and, applying to their artificer the theory of the human
understanding, they pretended that the Demi-Ourgos had framed his
machine on a plan already existing in his understanding. Now, as their
masters, the naturalists, had placed in the regions of the fixed stars
the great primum mobile, under the name of intelligence and reason, so
t