The heavens and the earth join in
the same testimony: The whole chorus of Nature raises one hymn to
the praises of its Creator. You alone, or almost alone, disturb
this general harmony. You start abstruse doubts, cavils, and
objections: You ask me, what is the cause of this cause? I know
not; I care not; that concerns not me. I have found a Deity; and
here I stop my inquiry. Let those go further, who are wiser or
more enterprising.
I pretend to be neither, replied P/HILO\: And for that very
reason, I should never perhaps have attempted to go so far;
especially when I am sensible, that I must at last be contented
to sit down with the same answer, which, without further trouble,
might have satisfied me from the beginning. If I am still to
remain in utter ignorance of causes, and can absolutely give an
explication of nothing, I shall never esteem it any advantage to
shove off for a moment a difficulty, which, you acknowledge, must
immediately, in its full force, recur upon me. Naturalists indeed
very justly explain particular effects by more general causes,
though these general causes themselves should remain in the end
totally inexplicable; but they never surely thought it
satisfactory to explain a particular effect by a particular
cause, which was no more to be accounted for than the effect
itself. An ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent
design, is not a whit more explicable than a material one, which
attains its order in a like manner; nor is there any more
difficulty in the latter supposition than in the former.
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