"As many philosophers as adopt the supposition--such as the Pythagoreans and Spensippus--that what is best and most fair is not to be found in the principle of things, from the fact that though the first principles both of plants and animals are causes, yet what is fair and perfect resides in created things as results from these,--persons, I say, who entertain these sentiments, do not form their opinions correctly. For seed arises from other natures that are antecedent and perfect, and seed is not the first thing, whereas that which is perfect is."--Aristotle, 'Metaphysics,' xi. 7. "It is manifest by the light of nature that there must at least be as much reality in the efficient and entire cause as in its effect; for whence can the effect draw its reality if not from its cause? And how could the cause communicate to it this reality unless it possessed it in itself? And hence it follows, not only that what is cannot be produced by what is not, but likewise that the more perfect--in other words, that which contains in itself more reality--cannot be the effect of the less perfect."--Descartes, 'Meditations,' iii. "In not a few of the progressionists the weak illusion is unmistakable, that, with time enough, you may get everything out of next-to-nothing. Grant us, they seem to say, any tiniest granule of power, so close upon zero that it is not worth begrudging--allow it some trifling tendency to infinitesimal increment--and we will show you how this little stock became the kosmos, without ever taking a step worth thinking of, much less constituting a case for design. The argument is a mere appeal to an incompetency in the human imagination, in virtue of which, magnitudes evading conception are treated as out of existence; and an aggregate of inappreciable increments is simultaneously equated,--in its cause to _nothing_, in its effect to _the whole of things_. You manifestly want the same causality, whether concentrated on a moment or distributed through incalculable ages; only, in drawing upon it, a logical theft is more easily committed piecemeal than wholesale. Surely it is a mean device for a philosopher thus to crib causation by hair's-breadths, to put it out at compound interest through all time, and then disown the debt."--Martineau, 'Essays Philosophical and Theological,' pp. 141, 142.