Language like this was much in vogue among the French encyclopaedists of the last century. By opposing it, even Voltaire incurred the reputation of bigotry, and Hume probably had to listen to a good deal of it on that memorable occasion when, dining with Baron D'Holbach, and intimating to his host his disbelief in the existence of atheists, he was informed by way of reply that he was actually at table with seventeen members of the sect.[36] That in England, too, it was a good deal talked at about the same and a somewhat later period, may be inferred from the fact that against its teaching one of Paley's most celebrated treatises was expressly directed. Doctrine which was once so fashionable, and which even now cannot be said to be obsolete, was not, of course, without some show of reason to support it, and somewhat in this wise the chief arguments in its behalf were usually marshalled:--In order to account for actual result, there is no need to imagine previous purpose. All things that exist, all events that occur, must bear to each other some relations in situation and time, which relations are not less likely to be orderly than disorderly, or, rather, indeed, are more likely to be the former than the latter. For necessarily the rarer rises above the denser; the stronger compels the weaker; that which is pushed hardest runs fastest. And even though, among organic forms, orderly and disorderly had been, by the purely fortuitous concurrence of atoms, originally produced in equal numbers, the former would be sure in the course of ages to become the more numerous, and that in proportion to the orderliness of their composition, and to their consequent suitableness for the reception and maintenance of organic life, by which they in turn would be maintained and multiplied, while less aptly organised forms, succumbing in the struggle for existence, perished and vanished away. Thus everything arranges itself--_everything_, however, being here another name for Nature, which alone does or can exist, which is all and does all; yet, though doing all things in general, does whatever it does quite unintelligently, and without the least desire of doing any one thing in particular more than another.