of self-motion; and nature, to act, has no need of a mover, whose
pretended essence would hinder him from acting.


42. Whence comes man? What is his origin? Did the first man spring,
ready formed, from the dust of the earth? Man appears, like all other
beings, a production of nature. Whence came the first stones, the
first trees, the first lions, the first elephants, the first ants,
the first acorns? We are incessantly told to acknowledge and revere
the hand of God, of an infinitely wise, intelligent and powerful
maker, in so wonderful a work as the human machine. I readily confess,
that the human machine appears to me surprising. But as man exists
in nature, I am not authorized to say that his formation, is above
the power of nature. But I can much less conceive of this formation,
when to explain it, I am told, that a pure spirit, who has neither
eyes, feet, hands, head, lungs, mouth nor breath, made man by taking
a little clay, and breathing upon it.

We laugh at the savage inhabitants of Paraguay, for calling themselves
the descendants of the moon. The divines of Europe call themselves
the descendants, or the creation, of a pure spirit. Is this pretension
any more rational? Man is intelligent; thence it is inferred, that
he can be the work only of an intelligent being, and not of a nature,
which is void of intelligence. Although nothing is more rare, than
to see man make use of this intelligence, of which he seems so proud,
I will grant that he is intelligent, that his wants develop this faculty,
that society especially contributes to cultivate it. But I see nothing
in the human machine, and in the intelligence with which it is endued,
that announces very precisely the infinite intelligence of the maker
to whom it is ascribed. I see that this admirable machine is liable to