"The physicist, whose profession is to instruct and not to edify, will abandon the _Why_, and will busy himself only with the _How_.... How many absurd ideas, false suppositions, chimerical notions in those hymns which some rash defenders of final causes have dared to compose in honour of the Creator? Instead of sharing the transports of admiration of the prophet, and crying out at the sight of the unnumbered stars that light up the midnight sky, _The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork_, they have given themselves up to the superstition of their conjectures. Instead of adoring the All-Powerful in the creation of nature, they have prostrated themselves before the phantoms of their imagination. If any one doubts the justice of my reproach, I invite him to compare Galen's treatise on the use of parts of the human body, with the physiology of Boerhaave, and the physiology of Boerhaave with that of Haller; I invite posterity to compare the systematic or passing views of Haller with what will be the physiology of future times. Man praises the Eternal for his own poor views; and the Eternal who hears from the elevation of his throne, and who knows his own design, accepts the silly praise and smiles at man's vanity" (Sec. 56). The world has advanced rapidly along this path since Diderot's day, and has opened out many new and unsuspected meanings by the way. Perhaps the advance has been less satisfactory in working out, in a scientific way, the philosophy that is implied in the following adaptation of the Leibnitzian and Maupertuisian suggestion of the law of economy in natural forces:--"Astonishment often comes from our supposing several marvels, where in truth there is only one; from our imagining in nature as many particular acts as we can count phenomena, whilst _nature has perhaps in reality never produced more than one single act_. It seem even that, if nature had been under the necessity of producing several acts, the different results of such acts would be isolated; that there would be collections of phenomena independent of one another, and that the general chain of which philosophy assumes the continuity, would break in many places. _The absolute independence of a single fact is incompatible with the idea of an All; and without the idea of a Whole, there can be no Philosophy_" (Sec. 11).