adjustment of means to ends in a house and in the universe so slight a
resemblance? The economy of final causes? The order, proportion, and
arrangement of every part? Steps of a stair are plainly contrived, that
human legs may use them in mounting; and this inference is certain and
infallible. Human legs are also contrived for walking and mounting; and
this inference, I allow, is not altogether so certain, because of the
dissimilarity which you remark; but does it, therefore, deserve the name
only of presumption or conjecture?

Good God! cried DEMEA, interrupting him, where are we? Zealous defenders
of religion allow, that the proofs of a Deity fall short of perfect
evidence! And you, PHILO, on whose assistance I depended in proving the
adorable mysteriousness of the Divine Nature, do you assent to all these
extravagant opinions of CLEANTHES? For what other name can I give them?
or, why spare my censure, when such principles are advanced, supported by
such an authority, before so young a man as PAMPHILUS?

You seem not to apprehend, replied PHILO, that I argue with CLEANTHES in
his own way; and, by showing him the dangerous consequences of his
tenets, hope at last to reduce him to our opinion. But what sticks most
with you, I observe, is the representation which CLEANTHES has made of
the argument a posteriori; and finding that that argument is likely to
escape your hold and vanish into air, you think it so disguised, that you
can scarcely believe it to be set in its true light. Now, however much I
may dissent, in other respects, from the dangerous principles of
CLEANTHES, I must allow that he has fairly represented that argument; and
I shall endeavour so to state the matter to you, that you will entertain
no further scruples with regard to it.

Were a man to abstract from every thing which he knows or has seen, he