And if in this way we suppose a planet to be produced, what sort of a body would it be?--something, it may be presumed, resembling a large meteoric stone. How comes this mass to be covered with motion and organization, with life and happiness? What primitive cause stocked it with plants and animals, and produced all the wonderful and subtle contrivances which we find in their structure, all the wide and profound mutual dependencies which we trace in their economy? Was man, with his thought and feeling, his powers and hopes, his will and conscience, also produced as an ultimate result of the condensation of the solar atmosphere? Except we allow a prior purpose and intelligence presiding over this material “primitive cause,” how irreconcilable is it with the evidence which crowds in upon us from every side! 3. In the next place, we may observe concerning this hypothesis, that it carries us back to the beginning of the present system of things; but that it is impossible for our reason to stop at the point thus presented to it. The sun, the earth, the planets, the moons were brought into their present order out of a previous state, and, as is supposed in the theory, by the natural operation of laws. But how came that previous state to exist? We are compelled to suppose that it, in like manner, was educed from a still prior state of things; and this, again, must have been the result of a condition prior still. Nor is it possible for us to find, in the tenets of the nebular hypothesis, any resting place or satisfaction for the mind. The same reasoning faculty, which seeks for the origin of the present system of things, and is capable of assenting to, or dissenting from the hypothesis propounded by Laplace as an answer to this inquiry, is necessarily led to seek, in the same manner, for the origin of any previous system of things, out of which the present may appear to have grown: and must pursue this train of inquiries unremittingly, so long as the answer which it receives describes a mere assemblage of matter and motion; since it would be to contradict the laws of matter and the nature of motion, to suppose such an assemblage to be the _first_ condition.