"What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions.
All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift
succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish;
a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now
with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I
might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your
own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an
ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as
you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant. Yet the
insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious
succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an
immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away, without the
possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in
space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter,
space--all, it may be, are no more than a point."[71]

Diderot sent a copy of his work to Voltaire. The poet replied with his
usual playful politeness, but declared his dissent from Saunderson, "who
denied God, because he happened to have been born blind."[72] More
pretentious, and infinitely less acute critics than Voltaire, have fixed
on the same point in the argument and met it by the same answer; namely,
that, blind as he was, Saunderson ought to have recognised an
intelligent Being who had provided him with so many substitutes for
sight; he ought to have inferred a skilful demiurgus from those ordered
relations in the universe, which Thought, independently of Vision, might
well have disclosed to him. In truth, this is not the centre of the
whole argument. When Saunderson implies that he could only admit a God
on condition that he could touch him, he makes a single sense the
channel of all possible ideas, and the arbiter of all reasoned