ot say that the ocean was made for the ships. One
feels how ridiculous it would be to maintain that nature had worked from
all time in order to adjust herself to the inventions of our arbitrary
arts, which appeared so late; but it is quite evident that if noses were
not made for spectacles, they were for smelling, and that there have
been noses ever since there have been men. Similarly, hands not having
been given on behalf of glove-makers, they are visibly destined for all
the purposes which the metacarpal bones and the phalanges and the
circular muscle of the wrist may procure for us.

Cicero, who doubted everything, did not, however, doubt final causes.

It seems especially difficult for the organs of generation not to be
destined to perpetuate the species. This mechanism is very admirable,
but the sensation which nature has joined to this mechanism is still
more admirable. Epicurus had to avow that pleasure is divine; and that
this pleasure is a final cause, by which are ceaselessly produced
sentient beings who have not been able to give themselves sensation.

This Epicurus was a great man for his time; he saw what Descartes
denied, what Gassendi affirmed, what Newton demonstrated, that there is
no movement without space. He conceived the necessity of atoms to serve
as constituent parts of invariable species. Those are exceedingly
philosophical ideas. Nothing was especially more worthy of respect than
the moral system of the true Epicureans; it consisted in the removal to
a distance of public matters incompatible with wisdom, and in
friendship, without which life is a burden. But as regards the rest of
Epicurus' physics, they do not appear any more admissible than
Descartes' channelled matter. It is, it seems to me, to stop one's eyes
and understanding to maintain that there is no design in nature; and if
there is design, there is an intelligent cause, there exists a God.

People present to us as objections the irregularities of the globe, the
volcanoes, the plains of shifting sands, a few small mountains destroyed
and others formed by earthquakes, etc. But from the fact that the naves
of the wheels of your coach have caught fire, does it ensue that your
coach was not made expressly to carry you from one place to another?

The chains of mountains which crown the two hemispheres, and more than
six hundred rivers which flow right to the sea from the feet of these
rocks; all the streams which come down from these sa