to prove
to us the existence of a God, you copy complete treatises on botany; you
enter into minute details of the parts of the human body; you ascend
into the air to contemplate the revolutions of the stars; you return
then to earth to admire the course of the waters; you fly into ecstasies
over butterflies, insects, polyps, organized atoms, in which you think
to find the greatness of your God; all these things will not prove the
existence of this God; they will only prove that you have not the ideas
which you should have of the immense variety of causes and effects that
can produce the infinitely diversified combinations, of which the
universe is the assemblage. This will prove that you ignore nature, that
you have no idea of her resources when you judge her incapable of
producing a multitude of forms and beings, of which your eyes, even by
the aid of the microscope, see but the least part; finally, this will
prove, that not being able to know the sensible and comprehensible
agents, you find it easier to have recourse to a word, by which you
designate an agent, of whom it will always be impossible for you to form
any true idea.

XXXIX.--THE WORLD HAS NOT BEEN CREATED, AND MATTER MOVES BY ITSELF.

They tell us gravely that there is no effect without a cause; they
repeat to us very often that the world did not create itself. But the
universe is a cause, not an effect; it is not a work, has not been made,
because it was impossible that it should be made. The world has always
been, its existence is necessary. It is the cause of itself. Nature,
whose essence is visibly acting and producing, in order to fulfill her
functions, as we see she does, needs no invisible motor far more unknown
than herself. Matter moves by its own energy, by the necessary result of
its heterogeneity; the diversity of its movements or of its ways of
acting, constitute only the diversity of substances; we distinguish one
being from another but by the diversity of the impressions or movements
which they communicate to our organs.

XL.--CONTINUATION.

You see that everything in nature is in a state of activity, and you
pretend that nature of itself is dead and without energy! You believe
that all this, acting of itself, has need of a motor! Well! who is this
motor? It is a spirit, that is to say, an absolutely incomprehensible
and contradictory being. Conclude then, I say to you, that matter acts
of itself, and cease to reason about yo