Page:Rousseau - Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, 1889.djvu/48

 presumption was it to set down to make a book of those wonders of nature that display the wisdom of their author? Had his book been as big as the whole world, he would not have exhausted his subject; and no sooner do we enter into the minutiae of things than the greatest wonder of all escapes us;—that is, the harmony and connection of the whole. The generation of living and organized bodies alone baffles all the efforts of the human understanding. That insurmountable barrier which nature has placed between the various species of animals, that they might not be confounded with each other, makes her intentions sufficiently evident. Not contented only to establish order, she has taken effectual methods to prevent its being disturbed.

There is not a being in the universe which may not, in some respect, be regarded as the common center of all others, which are ranged around it in such a manner that they serve reciprocally as cause and effect to one another. The imagination is lost and the understanding confounded in such an infinite diversity of relations, of which, however, not one of them is either lost or confounded in the crowd. How absurd the attempt to deduce this wonderful harmony from the blind mechanism of a fortuitous jumble of atoms! Those who deny the unity of design, so manifest in the relation of all the parts of this grand system, may endeavor as much as they will to conceal their absurdities with abstract ideas, coördinations, general principles, and emblematical terms. Whatever they may advance, it is impossible for me to conceive that a system of beings can be so wisely regulated, without the existence of some intelligent cause which effects