Page:Rousseau - Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, 1889.djvu/47

 the truth of what you advance? and how will you divest me of that involuntary sentiment which continually contradicts you? If organized bodies are fortuitously combined in a thousand ways before they assume settled and constant forms; if at first they are formed stomachs without mouths, feet without heads, hands without arms, and imperfect organs of every kind, which have perished for want of the necessary faculties of self-preservation; how comes it that none of these imperfect essays have engaged our attention? Why has nature at length confined herself to laws to which she was not at first subjected? I confess that I ought not to be surprised that any possible thing should happen, when the rarity of the event is compensated by the great odds that it did not happen. And yet if anyone were to tell me that a number of printer's types, jumbled promiscuously together, had arranged themselves in the order of the letters composing the Æneid, I certainly should not deign to take one step to verify or disprove such a story. It may be said, I forget the number of chances: but pray how many must I suppose to render such a combination in any degree probable? I, who see only the one, must conclude that there is an infinite number against it, and that it is not the effect of chance. Add to this that the product of these combinations must be always of the same nature with the combined elements; hence life and organization never can result from a blind concourse of atoms, nor will the chemist, with all his art in compounds, ever find sensation and thought at the bottom of his crucible.

I have been frequently surprised and sometimes scandalized in the reading of Nieuwentheit. What a