"... We have already remarked that the understanding has eternal verities for its object. The standards by which we measure all things are eternal and invariable. We know clearly that every thing in the universe is made according to proportion, from the greatest to the least, from the strongest to the weakest, and we know it well enough to understand that these proportions are related to the principles of eternal truth. All that is demonstrated in mathematics, and in any other science whatever, is eternal and immutable, since the effect of the demonstration is to show that the thing cannot be otherwise than as it is demonstrated to be. So, in order to understand the nature and the properties of things which I know, for example, a triangle, a square, a circle, or the relations of these figures, and all other figures, to each other, it is not necessary that I should find such in nature, and I may be sure that I have never traced, never seen, any that are perfect. Neither is it necessary that I should think that there is motion in the world in order to understand the nature of motion itself, or that of the lines which every motion describes, and the hidden proportions according to which it is developed. When the idea of these things is once awakened in my mind, I know that, whether they have an actual existence or not, so they must be, that it is impossible for them to be of another nature, or to be made in a different way. To come to something that concerns us more nearly, I mean by these principles of eternal truth, that they do not depend on human existence, that, so far as he is capable of reasoning, it is the essential duty of man to live according to reason, and to search for his maker, through fear of lacking the recognition of his maker, if in fault of searching for him, he should be ignorant of him. All these truths, and all those which I deduce from them by sure reasoning, subsist independently of all time. In whatever time I place a human understanding, it will know them, but in knowing them it will find them truths, it will not make them such, for our cognitions do not make their objects, but suppose them. So these truths subsist before all time, before the existence of a human understanding: and were every thing that is made according to the laws of proportion, that is to say, every thing that I see in nature, destroyed except myself, these laws would be preserved in my thought, and I should clearly see that they would always be good and always true, were I also destroyed with the rest. "If I seek how, where, and in what subject they subsist eternal and immutable, as they are, I am obliged to avow the existence of a being in whom truth is eternally subsisting, in whom it is always understood; and this being must be truth itself, and must be all truth, and from him it is that truth is derived in every thing that exists and has understanding out of him.