Divines and
philosophers had proved beyond all controversy, from the beauty
and usefulness of the several parts of the creation, that it was
the workmanship of God. But that -- setting aside all help of
astronomy and natural philosophy, all contemplation of the
contrivance, order, and adjustment of things -- an infinite Mind
should be necessarily inferred from the bare
sensible world>, is an advantage to them only who have made this
easy reflexion: that the sensible world is that which we perceive
by our several senses; and that nothing is perceived by the
senses beside ideas; and that no {213} idea or archetype of an
idea can exist otherwise than in a mind. You may now, without any
laborious search into the sciences, without any subtlety of
reason, or tedious length of discourse, oppose and baffle the
most strenuous advocate for Atheism. Those miserable refuges,
whether in an eternal succession of unthinking causes and
effects, or in a fortuitous concourse of atoms; those wild
imaginations of Vanini, Hobbes, and Spinoza: in a word, the whole
system of Atheism, is it not entirely overthrown, by this single
reflexion on the repugnancy included in supposing the whole, or
any part, even the most rude and shapeless, of the visible world,
to exist without a mind? Let any one of those abettors of impiety
but look into his own thoughts, and there try if he can conceive
how so much as a rock, a desert, a chaos, or confused jumble of
atoms; how anything at all, either sensible or imaginable, can
exist independent of a Mind, and he need go no farther to be
convinced of his folly.
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