God is the author of the phenomena of nature, is it not to attribute
them to an occult cause? What is God? What is a spirit? They are
causes of which we have no idea. O wise divines! Study nature and
her laws; and since you can there discover the action of natural causes,
go not to those that are supernatural, which, far from enlightening,
will only darken your ideas, and make it utterly impossible that
you should understand yourselves.


38. Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is
to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of
a cause which you understand not at all. You think to elucidate what
is obscure, by doubling the obscurity; to solve difficulties, by
multiplying them. O enthusiastic philosophers! To prove the existence
of a God, write complete treatises of botany; enter into a minute
detail of the parts of the human body; launch forth into the sky,
to contemplate the revolution of the stars; then return to the earth
to admire the course of waters; behold with transport the butterflies,
the insects, the polypi, and the organized atoms, in which you think
you discern the greatness of your God. All these things will not
prove the existence of God; they will prove only, that you have not
just ideas of the immense variety of matter, and of the effects,
producible by its infinitely diversified combinations, that constitute
the universe. They will prove only your ignorance of nature; that
you have no idea of her powers, when you judge her incapable of producing
a multitude of forms and beings, of which your eyes, even with the
assistance of microscopes, never discern but the smallest part.
In a word, they will prove, that, for want of knowing sensible agents,
or those possible to know, you find it shorter to have recourse to a
word, expressing an inconceivable agent.