inscriptions in unknown characters. Would he presently say: men
never inhabited this place; no human hand had anything to do here;
it is chance that formed these columns, that placed them on their
pedestals, and crowned them with their capitals, with such just
proportions; it is chance that so firmly jointed the pieces that
make up these pyramids; it is chance that cut the obelisks in one
single stone, and engraved in them these characters? Would he not,
on the contrary, say, with all the certainty the mind of man is
capable of: these magnificent ruins are the remains of a noble and
majestical architecture that flourished in ancient Egypt? This is
what plain reason suggests, at the first cast of the eye, or first
sight, and without reasoning. It is the same with the bare prospect
of the universe. A man may by vain, long-winded, preposterous
reasonings confound his own reason and obscure the clearest notions:
but the single cast of the eye is decisive. Such a work as the
world is never makes itself of its own accord. There is more art
and proportion in the bones, tendons, veins, arteries, nerves, and
muscles, that compose man's body, than in all the architecture of
the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. The single eye of the least of
living creatures surpasses the mechanics of all the most skilful
artificers. If a man should find a watch in the sands of Africa, he
would never have the assurance seriously to affirm, that chance
formed it in that wild place; and yet some men do not blush to say
that the bodies of animals, to the artful framing of which no watch
can ever be compared, are the effects of the caprices of chance.


SECT. LXXIV. Another Objection of the Epicureans drawn from the
Eternal Motion of Atoms.