“As gravity is the common quality of all bodies, arising not from the nature and properties of matter, nor to be explained without the agency of a foreign cause, yet producing numberless uniform effects in the corporeal system, it is in all reason to be attributed to one contrivance, rather than the different designs of two or more partial independent causes. What a vast variety of appearances in nature depend on this one? The self-balanced earth hangs upon its centre; the mountains are set fast; there is a perpetual flux and reflux of the sea; vapours continually arise; the clouds are balanced till by their own weight they descend in rain; animals breathe and move; the heavenly bodies hold their stations, and go on in their constant course, by the force of gravity, after the _ordinance_ of that wisdom which appointed them this law. Now when we see a multitude of effects proceeding from one Cause, effects so various in their kind and so important, a Cause simple and unvaried in all the diversity produced by it, can we avoid ascribing this to an unity of intelligence, if there be intelligence in it all? For could we suppose different independent beings, acting with different designs, and by distinct operations to have formed the several parts of the world, and the several species of creatures which are in it, what reason can be imagined why they should all be governed by, and all necessarily depend upon, one law? The Maker of the sun, or, if a partial cause of nature could be supposed to have an understanding large enough for it, the Contriver of the whole visible heavens, must, one would think, have finished his scheme independently on any other, without borrowing aid from the work of another God. In like manner the Gods of the seas and of the dry land, and the Creator of animals, would have completed their several systems, each by itself, not depending on any other for its order and preservation. Whereas, on the contrary, we see in fact they are none of them independent, but all held together by the common bond of gravity. The heavens and the earth continue in their situations at a proper distance from each other by the force of this law; the sea keeps within its channels; and animals live and move by it. All which lead us to acknowledge one directing Counsel in the whole frame. For what but an understanding which comprehends the whole extent of nature, reaching from the utmost circuit of heaven to the centre of the earth, could have fixed such a common law, so necessary to all its parts, that without it not one of them could subsist, nor the harmony of the whole be preserved? The strict cohesion of the parts which constitute particular bodies requires a peculiar cement, different from that of the gravitating force; and as it can never be explained by the nature and properties of matter itself, and is