Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour
nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all
its moral and religious consequences; some--

------who deem themselves most free,
When they within this gross and visible sphere
Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat
With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all
Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
Untenanting creation of its God!

Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men,
before they can become wiser.

The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to
discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a
faith could find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed.
These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their
common genus; the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes
and essence; and the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a
faculty, for the faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of
my life, not its cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes
but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes
must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight
possible. Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of
this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity,
(Leibnitz's Lex Continui,) is the limit and condition of the laws of