necessity?

ANSWER

This objection, oft-repeated since Lucretius, is sufficiently refuted by
the gift of sensation in animals, and by the gift of intelligence in
man. How should combinations "which chance has produced," produce this
sensation and this intelligence (as has just been said in the preceding
paragraph)? Without any doubt the limbs of animals are made for their
needs with incomprehensible art, and you are not so bold as to deny it.
You say no more about it. You feel that you have nothing to answer to
this great argument which nature brings against you. The disposition of
a fly's wing, a snail's organs suffices to bring you to the ground.


MAUPERTUIS' OBJECTION

Modern natural philosophers have but expanded these so-called arguments,
often they have pushed them to trifling and indecency. They have found
God in the folds of the skin of the rhinoceros: one could, with equal
reason, deny His existence because of the tortoise's shell.

ANSWER

What reasoning! The tortoise and the rhinoceros, and all the different
species, are proof equally in their infinite variety of the same cause,
the same design, the same aim, which are preservation, generation and
death.

There is unity in this infinite variety; the shell and the skin bear