assign the ultimate principle in one case more than in the other. The
same ignorance, therefore, reduces them to the same conclusion. They
assert that the Deity is the immediate cause of the union between soul
and body; and that they are not the organs of sense, which, being
agitated by external objects, produce sensations in the mind; but that
it is a particular volition of our omnipotent Maker, which excites such
a sensation, in consequence of such a motion in the organ. In like
manner, it is not any energy in the will that produces local motion in
our members: It is God himself, who is pleased to second our will, in
itself impotent, and to command that motion which we erroneously
attribute to our own power and efficacy. Nor do philosophers stop at
this conclusion. They sometimes extend the same inference to the mind
itself, in its internal operations. Our mental vision or conception of
ideas is nothing but a revelation made to us by our Maker. When we
voluntarily turn our thoughts to any object, and raise up its image in
the fancy, it is not the will which creates that idea: It is the
universal Creator, who discovers it to the mind, and renders it
present to us.

56. Thus, according to these philosophers, every thing is full of God.
Not content with the principle, that nothing exists but by his will,
that nothing possesses any power but by his concession: They rob nature,
and all created beings, of every power, in order to render their
dependence on the Deity still more sensible and immediate. They consider
not that, by this theory, they diminish, instead of magnifying, the
grandeur of those attributes, which they affect so much to celebrate. It
argues surely more power in the Deity to delegate a certain degree of
power to inferior creatures than to produce every thing by his own
immediate volition. It argues more wisdom to contrive at first the
fabric of the world with such perfect foresight that, of itself, and by