Good Sense Part 3

Do not theologians reason very strangely? They invent phantoms, they compose them of contradictions; they then a.s.sure us, it is safest not to doubt the existence of these phantoms they themselves have invented.

According to this mode of reasoning, there is no absurdity, which it would not be more safe to believe, than not to believe.

All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of G.o.d. Are they then criminal on account of their ignorance? At what age must they begin to believe in G.o.d? It is, you say, at the age of reason. But at what time should this age commence? Besides, if the profoundest theologians lose themselves in the divine nature, which they do not presume to comprehend, what ideas must man have of him?

31.

Men believe in G.o.d only upon the word of those, who have no more idea of him than themselves. Our nurses are our first theologians. They talk to children of G.o.d as if he were a scarecrow; they teach them from the earliest age to join their hands mechanically. Have nurses then more true ideas of G.o.d than the children whom they teach to pray?

32.

Religion, like a family estate, pa.s.ses, with its inc.u.mbrances, from parents to children. Few men in the world would have a G.o.d, had not pains been taken in infancy to give them one. Each would receive from his parents and teachers the G.o.d whom they received from theirs; but each, agreeably to his disposition, would arrange, modify, and paint him in his own manner.

33.

The brain of man, especially in infancy, is like soft wax, fit to receive every impression that is made upon it. Education furnishes him with almost all his ideas at a time, when he is incapable of judging for himself. We believe we have received from nature, or have brought with us at birth, the true or false ideas, which, in a tender age, had been instilled into our minds; and this persuasion is one of the greatest sources of errors.

34.

Prejudice contributes to cement in us the opinions of those who have been charged with our instruction. We believe them much more experienced than ourselves; we suppose they are fully convinced of the things which they teach us; we have the greatest confidence in them; by the care they have taken of us in infancy, we judge them incapable of wis.h.i.+ng to deceive us.

These are the motives that make us adopt a thousand errors, without other foundation than the hazardous authority of those by whom we have been brought up. The prohibition likewise of reasoning upon what they teach us, by no means lessens our confidence; but often contributes to increase our respect for their opinions.

35.

Divines act very wisely in teaching men their religious principles before they are capable of distinguis.h.i.+ng truth from falsehood, or their left hand from their right. It would be as difficult to instill into the mind of a man, forty years old, the extravagant notions that are given us of the divinity, as to eradicate them from the mind of him who had imbibed them from infancy.

36.

It is observed, that the wonders of nature are sufficient to lead us to the existence of a G.o.d, and fully to convince us of this important truth.

But how many are there in the world who have the time, capacity, or disposition, necessary to contemplate Nature and meditate her progress?

Men, for the most part, pay no regard to it. The peasant is not struck with the beauty of the sun, which he sees every day. The sailor is not surprised at the regular motion of the ocean; he will never draw from it theological conclusions. The phenomena of nature prove the existence of a G.o.d only to some prejudiced men, who have been early taught to behold the finger of G.o.d in every thing whose mechanism could embarra.s.s them. In the wonders of nature, the unprejudiced philosopher sees nothing but the power of nature, the permanent and various laws, the necessary effects of different combinations of matter infinitely diversified.

37.

Is there any thing more surprising than the logic of these divines, who, instead of confessing their ignorance of natural causes, seek beyond nature, in imaginary regions, a cause much more unknown than that nature, of which they can form at least some idea? To say, that G.o.d is the author of the phenomena of nature, is it not to attribute them to an occult cause? What is G.o.d? What is a spirit? They are causes of which we have no idea. O wise divines! Study nature and her laws; and since you can there discover the action of natural causes, go not to those that are supernatural, which, far from enlightening, will only darken your ideas, and make it utterly impossible that you should understand yourselves.

38.

Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a G.o.d. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all. You think to elucidate what is obscure, by doubling the obscurity; to solve difficulties, by multiplying them. O enthusiastic philosophers! To prove the existence of a G.o.d, write complete treatises of botany; enter into a minute detail of the parts of the human body; launch forth into the sky, to contemplate the revolution of the stars; then return to the earth to admire the course of waters; behold with transport the b.u.t.terflies, the insects, the polypi, and the organized atoms, in which you think you discern the greatness of your G.o.d. All these things will not prove the existence of G.o.d; they will prove only, that you have not just ideas of the immense variety of matter, and of the effects, producible by its infinitely diversified combinations, that const.i.tute the universe. They will prove only your ignorance of nature; that you have no idea of her powers, when you judge her incapable of producing a mult.i.tude of forms and beings, of which your eyes, even with the a.s.sistance of microscopes, never discern but the smallest part. In a word, they will prove, that, for want of knowing sensible agents, or those possible to know, you find it shorter to have recourse to a word, expressing an inconceivable agent.

39.

We are gravely and repeatedly told, that, _there is no effect without a cause_; that, _the world did not make itself_. But the universe is a cause, it is not an effect; it is not a work; it has not been made, because it is impossible that it should have been made. The world has always been; its existence is necessary; it is its own cause. Nature, whose essence is visibly to act and produce, requires not, to discharge her functions, an invisible mover, much more unknown than herself. Matter moves by its own energy, by a necessary consequence of its heterogeneity.

The diversity of motion, or modes of mutual action, const.i.tutes alone the diversity of matter. We distinguish beings from one another only by the different impressions or motions which they communicate to our organs.

40.

You see, that all is action in nature, and yet pretend that nature, by itself, is dead and without power. You imagine, that this all, essentially acting, needs a mover! What then is this mover? It is a spirit; a being absolutely incomprehensible and contradictory. Acknowledge then, that matter acts of itself, and cease to reason of your spiritual mover, who has nothing that is requisite to put it in action. Return from your useless excursions; enter again into a real world; keep to _second causes_, and leave to divines their _first cause_, of which nature has no need, to produce all the effects you observe in the world.

41.

It can be only by the diversity of impressions and effects, which bodies make upon us, that we feel them; that we have perceptions and ideas of them; that we distinguish one from another; that we a.s.sign them properties. Now, to see or feel an object, the object must act upon our organs; this object cannot act upon us, without exciting some motion in us; it cannot excite motion in us, if it be not in motion itself. At the instant I see an object, my eyes are struck by it; I can have no conception of light and vision, without motion, communicated to my eye, from the luminous, extended, coloured body. At the instant I smell something, my sense is irritated, or put in motion, by the parts that exhale from the odoriferous body. At the moment I hear a sound, the tympanum of my ear is struck by the air, put in motion by a sonorous body, which would not act if it were not in motion itself. Whence it evidently follows, that, without motion, I can neither feel, see, distinguish, compare, judge, nor occupy my thoughts upon any subject whatever.

We are taught, that _the essence of a thing is that from which all its properties flow_. Now, it is evident, that all the properties of bodies, of which we have ideas, are owing to motion, which alone informs us of their existence, and gives us the first conceptions of them. I cannot be informed of my own existence but by the motions I experience in myself. I am therefore forced to conclude, that motion is as essential to matter as extension, and that matter cannot be conceived without it.

Should any person deny, that motion is essential and necessary to matter; they cannot, at least, help acknowledging that bodies, which seem dead and inert, produce motion of themselves, when placed in a fit situation to act upon one another. For instance; phosphorus, when exposed to the air, immediately takes fire. Meal and water, when mixed, ferment. Thus dead matter begets motion of itself. Matter has then the power of self-motion; and nature, to act, has no need of a mover, whose pretended essence would hinder him from acting.

42.

Whence comes man? What is his origin? Did the first man spring, ready formed, from the dust of the earth? Man appears, like all other beings, a production of nature. Whence came the first stones, the first trees, the first lions, the first elephants, the first ants, the first acorns? We are incessantly told to acknowledge and revere the hand of G.o.d, of an infinitely wise, intelligent and powerful maker, in so wonderful a work as the human machine. I readily confess, that the human machine appears to me surprising. But as man exists in nature, I am not authorized to say that his formation, is above the power of nature. But I can much less conceive of this formation, when to explain it, I am told, that a pure spirit, who has neither eyes, feet, hands, head, lungs, mouth nor breath, made man by taking a little clay, and breathing upon it.

We laugh at the savage inhabitants of Paraguay, for calling themselves the descendants of the moon. The divines of Europe call themselves the descendants, or the creation, of a pure spirit. Is this pretension any more rational? Man is intelligent; thence it is inferred, that he can be the work only of an intelligent being, and not of a nature, which is void of intelligence. Although nothing is more rare, than to see man make use of this intelligence, of which he seems so proud, I will grant that he is intelligent, that his wants develop this faculty, that society especially contributes to cultivate it. But I see nothing in the human machine, and in the intelligence with which it is endued, that announces very precisely the infinite intelligence of the maker to whom it is ascribed. I see that this admirable machine is liable to be deranged; I see, that his wonderful intelligence is then disordered, and sometimes totally disappears; I infer, that human intelligence depends upon a certain disposition of the material organs of the body, and that we cannot infer the intelligence of G.o.d, any more from the intelligence of man, than from his materiality. All that we can infer from it, is, that G.o.d is material. The intelligence of man no more proves the intelligence of G.o.d, than the malice of man proves the malice of that G.o.d, who is the pretended maker of man. In spite of all the arguments of divines, G.o.d will always be a cause contradicted by its effects, or of which it is impossible to judge by its works. We shall always see evil, imperfection and folly result from such a cause, that is said to be full of goodness, perfection and wisdom.