Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 36.djvu/29

Rh The God who holds the chain can't be enchained; The universal chain is not, as some have thought, a regular gradation which connects all beings. There is, in all probability, an immense distance between man and beast, as well as between man and substances of a superior nature; there is likewise an infinity between God and all created beings whatever. There are none of these insensible gradations in the globes which move round our sun in their several periods, whether we consider their mass, their distances, or their satellites.

If we may believe Pope, man is not capable of discovering the reason why the satellites of Jove are less than Jove himself; he is herein mistaken, such an error as this may well be overlooked in so fine a genius. Every smatterer in mathematics could have told Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Pope, that if the satellites of Jove had equalled him in magnitude, they could not have moved round him; but no mathematician is able to discover the regular gradation in the bodies of the solar system.

It is not true, that the world could not exist if a single atom was taken from it: This was justly observed by Mr. Crousaz, a learned geometrician, in a tract which he wrote against Pope. He seems to have been right in this point, though he was fully refuted by Mr. Warburton and Mr. Silhouette.

The concatenation of events was admitted and defended with the utmost ingenuity by the celebrated philosopher Leibnitz; it is worth explaining. All bodies and all events depend upon other bodies and other events. That cannot be denied; but all bodies are not essential to the support of the universe, and the preservation of its order; neither are all events necessary in the general series of events. A drop of water, a grain of sand more or less, can cause no revolution in the general system. Nature is not confined to any determinate quantity, or any determinate form. No planet moves in a curve completely regular; there is nothing in Nature of a figure exactly mathematical; no fixed quantity is required for any operation: Nature is never very strict or rigid in her method of proceeding. It is, therefore, absurd to advance, that the removal of an atom from the earth might be the cause of its destruction.

This holds, in like manner, with regard to events. The cause of every event is contained in some precedent event; this no philosopher has ever called in question. If Caesar's mother had never gone through the Caesarian operation, Caesar had never subverted the commonwealth; he could By His blest will are all events ordained: