This Epicurus was a great man for his time; he saw what Descartes
denied, what Gassendi affirmed, what Newton demonstrated, that there is
no movement without space. He conceived the necessity of atoms to serve
as constituent parts of invariable species. Those are exceedingly
philosophical ideas. Nothing was especially more worthy of respect than
the moral system of the true Epicureans; it consisted in the removal to
a distance of public matters incompatible with wisdom, and in
friendship, without which life is a burden. But as regards the rest of
Epicurus' physics, they do not appear any more admissible than
Descartes' channelled matter. It is, it seems to me, to stop one's eyes
and understanding to maintain that there is no design in nature; and if
there is design, there is an intelligent cause, there exists a God.
People present to us as objections the irregularities of the globe, the
volcanoes, the plains of shifting sands, a few small mountains destroyed
and others formed by earthquakes, etc. But from the fact that the naves
of the wheels of your coach have caught fire, does it ensue that your
coach was not made expressly to carry you from one place to another?
The chains of mountains which crown the two hemispheres, and more than
six hundred rivers which flow right to the sea from the feet of these
rocks; all the streams which come down from these same reservoirs, and
which swell the rivers, after fertilizing the country; the thousands of
fountains which start from the same source, and which water animal and
vegetable kind; all these things seem no more the effect of a fortuitous
cause and of a declension of atoms, than the retina which receives the
rays of light, the crystalline lens which refracts them, the incus, the
malleus, the stapes, the tympanic membrane of the ear, which receives
the sounds, the paths of the blood in our veins, the systole and
diastole of the heart, this pendulum of the machine which makes life.
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