Now, if we survey the universe, so far as it falls under our knowledge,
it bears a great resemblance to an animal or organised body, and seems
actuated with a like principle of life and motion. A continual
circulation of matter in it produces no disorder: a continual waste in
every part is incessantly repaired: the closest sympathy is perceived
throughout the entire system: and each part or member, in performing its
proper offices, operates both to its own preservation and to that of the
whole. The world, therefore, I infer, is an animal; and the Deity is the
SOUL of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it.

You have too much learning, CLEANTHES, to be at all surprised at this
opinion, which, you know, was maintained by almost all the Theists of
antiquity, and chiefly prevails in their discourses and reasonings. For
though, sometimes, the ancient philosophers reason from final causes, as
if they thought the world the workmanship of God; yet it appears rather
their favourite notion to consider it as his body, whose organisation
renders it subservient to him. And it must be confessed, that, as the
universe resembles more a human body than it does the works of human art
and contrivance, if our limited analogy could ever, with any propriety,
be extended to the whole of nature, the inference seems juster in favour
of the ancient than the modern theory.

There are many other advantages, too, in the former theory, which
recommended it to the ancient theologians. Nothing more repugnant to all
their notions, because nothing more repugnant to common experience, than
mind without body; a mere spiritual substance, which fell not under their
senses nor comprehension, and of which they had not observed one single
instance throughout all nature. Mind and body they knew, because they
felt both: an order, arrangement, organisation, or internal machinery, in
both, they likewise knew, after the same manner: and it could not but