"But, even admitting for a moment, that it is impossible to conceive of the universe without an artificer who formed it, and who preserves and watches over his work, where shall we place that artificer? Shall he be within or without the universe? Is he matter or motion? Or is he mere space, nothingness, vacuity? In each of these cases, he will either be nothing, or he will be comprehended in nature, and subjected to her laws. If he is in nature, I think I see in her only matter in motion, and cannot but thence conclude that the agent impelling her is corporeal and material, and that he is consequently liable to dissolution. If this agent is out of nature, then I have no idea of what place he can occupy, nor of an immaterial being, nor of the manner in which a spirit, without extension, can operate upon the matter from which it is separated. Those unknown tracts of space which imagination has placed beyond the visible world may be considered as having no existence for a being who can scarcely see to the distance of his own feet; the ideal power which inhabits them can never be represented to my mind, unless when my imagination combines at random the fantastic colors which it is always forced to employ in the world on which I am. In this case, I shall merely reproduce in idea what my senses have previously actually perceived; and that God, which I, as it were, compel myself to distinguish from nature, and to place beyond her circuit, will ever, in opposition to all my efforts, necessarily withdraw within it. "It will be observed and insisted upon by some that if a statue or a watch were shown to a savage who had never seen them, he would inevitably acknowledge that they were the productions of some intelligent agent, more powerful and ingenious than himself; and hence it will be inferred that we are equally bound to acknowledge that the machine of the universe, that man, that the phenomena of nature, are the productions of an agent, whose intelligence and power are far superior to our own.