astonish mankind; which man is not competent to explain. But is not this
wilful idleness? Is it not inconsistent with our nature? Is it not being
truly impious, to sit down with those fine faculties we have received,
and give the answer of a child to every thing we do not understand; or
rather which our own sloth, or our own want of industry has prevented us
from knowing? Ought we not rather to redouble our efforts to penetrate
the cause of those phenomena which strike our mind? Is not this, in
fact, the duty we owe to the great, the universal Parent? When we have
given this answer, what have we said? nothing but what every one knows.
Could the great _Cause of causes_ make the whole, without also making
its part? But does it of necessity follow that he executes every
trifling operation, when he has so noble an agent as his own nature,
whose laws he has rendered unchangeable, whose scale of operations can
never deviate from the eternal routine he has marked out for her and all
the beings she embraces? Whose secrets, if sought out, contain the true
balsam of life--the sovereign remedy for all the diseases of man.

When we shall be ingenuous with ourselves, we shall be obliged to agree
that it was uniformly the ignorance in which our ancestors were
involved, their want of knowledge of natural causes, their unenlightened
ideas on the powers of nature, which gave birth to the gods they
worshipped; that it is, again, the impossibility which the greater part
of mankind find to withdraw, themselves out of this ignorance, the
difficulty they consequently find to form to themselves simple ideas of
the formation of things, the labour that is required to discover the
true sources of those events, which they either admire or fear, that
makes them believe these ideas are necessary to enable them to render an
account of those phenomena, to which their own sluggishness renders them
incompetent to recur. Here, without doubt, is the reason they treat all
those as irrational who do not see the necessity of admitting an unknown