Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/249

Rh as it is usually and thoughtlessly conceived by people, is one of the most foolish things that has ever been devised.

How much more reasonable, more decent, more respectful to the supreme being, more in harmony with our nature, and therefore truer, is it not to say:

"We are machines made successively by the eternal geometrician; machines made like all the other animals, having the same organs, the same needs, the same pleasures, the same pains; far superior to all of them in many things, inferior to them in others; having received from the great being a principle of action which we cannot penetrate; receiving everything, giving ourselves nothing; and a million times more subject to him than the clay is to the potter who moulds it"?

Once more, either man is a god or he is precisely as I have described him.

There is a principle of action in man and in every animal, just as there is in every machine; and this first mover, this ultimate spring, is necessarily eternally arranged by the master, otherwise all would be chaos, and there would be no world.

Every animal, like every machine, necessarily and irresistibly obeys the power that directs it. That is evident, and sufficiently familiar. Every animal is possessed of will, and one must be a fool to