But, after all, whole nature shows the infinite art of its Maker.
When I speak of an art, I mean a collection of proper means chosen
on purpose to arrive at a certain end; or, if you please, it is an
order, a method, an industry, or a set design. Chance, on the
contrary, is a blind and necessary cause, which neither sets in
order nor chooses anything, and which has neither will nor
understanding. Now I maintain that the universe bears the character
and stamp of a cause infinitely powerful and industrious; and, at
the same time, that chance (that is, the blind and fortuitous
concourse of causes necessary and void of reason) cannot have formed
this universe. To this purpose it is not amiss to call to mind the
celebrated comparisons of the ancients.


SECT. V. Noble Comparisons proving that Nature shows the Existence
of its Maker. First Comparison, drawn from Homer's "Iliad."


Who will believe that so perfect a poem as Homer's "Iliad" was not
the product of the genius of a great poet, and that the letters of
the alphabet, being confusedly jumbled and mixed, were by chance, as
it were by the cast of a pair of dice, brought together in such an
order as is necessary to describe, in verses full of harmony and
variety, so many great events; to place and connect them so well
together; to paint every object with all its most graceful, most
noble, and most affecting attendants; in short, to make every person
speak according to his character in so natural and so forcible a
manner? Let people argue and subtilise upon the matter as much as
they please, yet they never will persuade a man of sense that the