lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond
what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various
machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other
with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever
contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all
nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of
human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence.
Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer,
by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the
Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed
of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which
he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument
alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity
to human mind and intelligence.

I shall be so free, CLEANTHES, said DEMEA, as to tell you, that from the
beginning, I could not approve of your conclusion concerning the
similarity of the Deity to men; still less can I approve of the mediums
by which you endeavour to establish it. What! No demonstration of the
Being of God! No abstract arguments! No proofs a priori! Are these, which
have hitherto been so much insisted on by philosophers, all fallacy, all
sophism? Can we reach no further in this subject than experience and
probability? I will not say that this is betraying the cause of a Deity:
But surely, by this affected candour, you give advantages to Atheists,
which they never could obtain by the mere dint of argument and reasoning.

What I chiefly scruple in this subject, said PHILO, is not so much that
all religious arguments are by CLEANTHES reduced to experience, as that
they appear not to be even the most certain and irrefragable of that
inferior kind. That a stone will fall, that fire will burn, that the