We are already acquainted with a force which acts in all directions, which disposes every thing in due order, tends towards an end, stops, begins again, and finishes, every moment, a complicated work; and this is the intelligent will, and certainly we have reason to be astonished, that the only faculty we have an intimate consciousness of, is the one philosopher’s turn from, when they investigate the admirable order of the universe. I allow, that they may, at the same time they reject the idea of a God, admit, as a principle, the eternal existence of a mechanical force, which, by an incomprehensible necessity, directed, towards a wise end, every thing that was at first confusedly scattered in the immensity of space; but this new supposition would form an hypothesis similar to the system of the eternal existence of the universe; in fact, the eternal existence of all the elements, of all substances, forces, and properties which were necessary to produce a certain order of things, would be a phœnomenon as incomprehensible as the existence of that order itself. We must add, that these two phœnomena would be separated in our thoughts only by an indivisible instant, an instant that we can neither describe nor imagine in the extent of the time represented by eternity; for any chosen period would be still too late by an infinity of ages. The necessary effect of an eternal cause has not, like that cause, any period to which we can fix its commencement. We thus perceive, under another point of view, how vain and ridiculous are the fantastic operations, they imagine, before the existence of the world, and which are attributed sometimes to the disordered movements of chance, and sometimes to the regular laws of blind necessity. There is then but one hypothesis to be opposed to the idea of a God: it is the system of the eternal existence of the universe. Such an atheistical system will always be more easily defended than any other, because that being founded on a supposition without bounds, it does not require to be embraced by reasoning, like all the hypothetical ideas, by which men make nature act according to an order of their own invention. We will, in the next chapter, consider this system, and discuss it by every means in our power. CHAP. XIV. _The same Subject continued._ Those who maintain that the world subsists of itself, and that there is not a God, say, in favour of their opinion, that if the eternal existence of the universe overwhelms our understanding, the eternal existence of a God is a still more inconceivable idea; and that such a supposition is only another difficulty, since, according to a common mode of judging, a work the most wonderful appears a phœnomenon less astonishing than the knowledge of which it is the result.