d, containing a discussion in which the respective parts are taken
by a deist, a pantheist, a subjective idealist, a sceptic, and an
atheist. The allegory falls into the background, and we have a plain
statement of some of the objections that may be made by the sceptical
atheist both to revelation and to natural religion. A starry sky calls
forth the usual glorification of the maker of so much beauty. "That is
all imagination," rejoins the atheist. "It is mere presumption. We have
before us an unknown machine, on which certain observations have been
made. Ignorant people who have only examined a single wheel of it, of
which they hardly know more than a tooth or two, form conjectures upon
the way in which their cogs fit in with a hundred thousand other wheels.
And then to finish like artisans, they label the work with the name of
it's author."

The defender justifies this by the argument from a repeater-watch, of
which Paley and others have made so much use. We at once ascribe the
structure and movement of a repeater-watch to intelligent creation.
"No--things are not equal," says the atheist. "You are comparing a
finished work, whose origin and manufacture we know, to an infinite
piece of complexity, whose beginnings, whose present condition, and
whose end are all alike unknown, and about whose author you have nothing
better than guesses."

But does not its structure announce an author? "No; you do not see who
nor what he is. Who told you that the order you admire here belies
itself nowhere else? Are you allowed to conclude from a point in space
to infinite space? You pile a vast piece of ground with earth-heaps
thrown here or there by chance, but among which the worm and the ant
find convenient dwelling-places enough. What would you think of these
insects, if, reasoning after your fashion, they fell into raptures over
the intelligence of the gardener who had arranged all these materials so
delightfully for their convenience?"[49]

In this rudimentary form the chief speaker presses some of the
objections to optimistic deism from the point of view of the fixed
limitations, the inevitable relativity, of human knowledge. This kind of
objection had been more pithily expressed by Pascal long before, in the
famous article of his Thoughts, on the difficulty of demonstrating the
existence of a deity by light of nature.[50] Diderot's argument does not
extend to dogmatic denial. It only shows that the deist is exposed to an
att