onious action and produced life?

SOME OF THE BEAUTIES (?) OF HARMONY AMONG UNBELIEVERS.

The author of "The System of Nature" says of the English Jesuit's creation
of eels by spontaneous generation from rye meal: "After moistening meal
with water, and shutting up the mixture, it is found after a little time,
with the aid of the microscope, that it has produced organized beings, of
whose production the water and meal were believed to be incapable. Thus
inanimate nature can pass into life, which is itself but an assemblage of
motions."--_Part 1, p. 23. For Needham's Eels, see the Volume of Physics_.

Voltaire says: "Were this unparalleled blunder true, yet, in rigorous
reasoning I do not see how it would prove there is no God."

He says, it is really strange that men, while denying a creator should
have attributed to themselves the power of creating eels. But it is yet
more deplorable that natural philosophers, of better information, adopted
the Jesuit Needham's ridiculous system, and joined it to that of Maillet,
who asserted that the ocean had formed the Alps and the Pyrenees, and that
men were originally porpoises, whose forked tails changed in the course of
time into thighs and legs. Such fancies are worthy to be placed with the
eels formed by meal.

Voltaire says the ridiculous story of the spontaneous production of eels
by rye meal is the foundation of D'Holbach's "System of Nature." He says:
"We were assured, not long ago, that at Brussels a hen had brought forth
half a dozen rabbits." He then adds, "Needham's eels soon followed the
Brussels hen." D'Holbach says: "Experience proves to us that the matter
which we regard as inert and dead, assumes action, intelligence, and life,
when it is combined in a certain way." Voltaire responds: "This is
precisely the difficulty. How does a germ come to life?"

The author of the "System of Nature" says: "Matter is eternal and
necessary; but its forms and its combinations are transitory and
contingent." Upon the supposition that _all is __ matter_, Voltaire
answers, it is hard to comprehend, matter being, according to our author,
_necessary_, and without freedom, how there can be anything contingent.

Again, the atheistic author of the "System of Nature" asserts that order
and disorder do not exist. This is strongly refuted by Voltaire, who says
the author is to be distrusted very often, both in physics and in morals.

Spinosa was a pantheist. He, like many mod