If no
camels had been created for the use of man in the sandy deserts
of A/FRICA\ and A/RABIA\, would the world have been dissolved? If
no lodestone had been framed to give that wonderful and useful
direction to the needle, would human society and the human kind
have been immediately extinguished? Though the maxims of Nature
be in general very frugal, yet instances of this kind are far
from being rare; and any one of them is a sufficient proof of
design, and of a benevolent design, which gave rise to the order
and arrangement of the universe.
At least, you may safely infer, said P/HILO\, that the
foregoing hypothesis is so far incomplete and imperfect, which I
shall not scruple to allow. But can we ever reasonably expect
greater success in any attempts of this nature? Or can we ever
hope to erect a system of cosmogony, that will be liable to no
exceptions, and will contain no circumstance repugnant to our
limited and imperfect experience of the analogy of Nature? Your
theory itself cannot surely pretend to any such advantage, even
though you have run into Anthropomorphism, the better to preserve
a conformity to common experience. Let us once more put it to
trial. In all instances which we have ever seen, ideas are copied
from real objects, and are ectypal, not archetypal, to express
myself in learned terms: You reverse this order, and give thought
the precedence. In all instances which we have ever seen, thought
has no influence upon matter, except where that matter is so
conjoined with it as to have an equal reciprocal influence upon
it.
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