is--what has it in common with a Being of sovereign intelligence? If it
fills you with astonishment, that is perhaps because you are in the
habit of treating as a prodigy anything that strikes you as being beyond
your own strength. I have been myself so often an object of admiration
for you, that I have a poor opinion of what surprises you. I have
attracted people from all parts of England, who could not conceive by
what means I could work at geometry. Well, you must agree that such
persons had not very exact notions about the possibility of things. Is a
phenomenon in our notions beyond the power of man? Then we instantly
say--_'Tis the handiwork of a God_. Nothing short of that can content
our vanity. Why can we not contrive to throw into our talk less pride
and more philosophy? If nature offers us some knot that is hard to
untie, let us leave it for what it is; do not let us employ for cutting
it the hand of a Being, who then immediately becomes in turn a new knot
for us, and a knot harder to untie than the first. An Indian tells you
that our globe is suspended in the air on the back of an elephant. And
the elephant! It stands on a tortoise. And the tortoise? what sustains
that?... You pity the Indian: and yet one might very well say to you as
to him--Mr. Holmes, my good friend, confess your ignorance, and spare me
elephant and tortoise."[69]

The minister very naturally then falls back upon good authority, and
asks Saunderson to take the word of Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz. The
blind man answers that though the actual state of the universe may be
the illustration of a marvellous and admirable order, still Newton,
Clarke, and Leibnitz must leave him freedom of opinion as to its earlier
states. And then he foreshadows in a really singular and remarkable way
that theory which is believed to be the great triumph of scientific
discovery, and which is certainly the great stimulus to speculation, in
our own time. As to anterior states "you have no witnesses to confront