fore the people he could easily have
defended his cause and proved his principles of philosophy to be as
salutary as those of his adversaries. And, if you please, I shall
suppose myself Epicurus for a moment, and make you stand for the
Athenian people."

EPICURUS: I come hither, O ye Athenians, to justify in your assembly
what I maintained in my school, and I find myself impeached by furious
antagonists instead of reasoning with calm and dispassionate inquirers.

By my accusers it is acknowledged that the chief or sole argument for a
divine existence (which I never questioned) is derived from the order of
nature; where there appear such marks of intelligence and design that
you think it extravagant to assign for its cause either chance or the
blind and unguided force of matter. You allow that this is an argument
drawn from effects to causes. From the order of the work you infer that
there must have been project and forethought in the workman. If you
cannot make out this point, you allow that your conclusion fails, and
you pretend not to establish the conclusion in a greater latitude than
the phenomena of nature will justify. These are your concessions. I
desire you to mark the consequences.

When we infer any particular cause from an effect we must proportion the
one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any
qualities but what are sufficient to produce the effect. A body of ten
ounces raised in a scale may serve as a proof that the counterbalancing
weight exceeds ten ounces, but never that it exceeds a hundred.

The same rule holds whether the cause assigned be brute, unconscious
matter or a rational, intelligent being. If the cause be known only by
the effect, we never ought to ascribe to it any qualities beyond what
are precisely requisite to produce the effect. Nor can we return back
from the cause and infer other effects from it beyond those by which
alone it is known to us.

Allowing, therefore, the gods to be the authors of the existence, or
order, of the universe, it follows that they possess that precise degree
of power, intelligence, and benevolence which appears in their
workmanship; but we can never be allowed to mount up from the universe,
the effect, to Jupiter, the cause, and then descend downwards to infer
any new effect from that cause. The knowledge of the cause being derived
solely from the effect, they must be exactly adjusted to each other; and
the one can never refer to