to believe there was a time when there was nothing, we
cannot so believe. Human nature is constituted intuitively or
instinctively to feel the eternity of something. To rid oneself of that
feeling is impossible. Nature, or something not nature must ever have
been, is a conclusion to which, what poets call Fate--

Leads the willing and drags the unwilling.

But does this undeniable truth make against Atheism? Far from it--so
far, indeed, as to make for it: the reason is no mystery. Of matter we
have ideas clear, precise, and indispensable, whereas, of something not
matter we cannot have any idea whatever, good, bad, or indifferent. The
Universe is extraordinary, no doubt, but so much of it as acts upon us
is perfectly conceivable, whereas, any thing within, without, or apart
from the Universe is perfectly inconceivable.

The notion of necessarily existing matter seems to the Author of this
Apology fatal to belief in God; that is, if by the word God be
understood something not matter, for 'tis precisely because priests were
unable to reconcile such belief with the idea of matter's self-existence
or eternity, that they took to imagining a 'First Cause.' In the
'forlorn hope' of clearing the difficulty of necessarily existing
_matter_, they assent to a necessarily existing _spirit_; and when the
nature of spirit is demanded from these assertors of its existence they
are constrained to avow that it is material or nothing.

Yes, they are constrained to make directly or indirectly one or other of
these admissions; for, as between truth and falsehood there is no middle
passage, so between something and nothing there is no intermediate
existence. Hence the serious dilemma of Spiritualists, who gravely tell
us their God is a Spirit, and that a Spirit is not any thing, which not
any thing or nothing (for the life of us we cannot distinguish between
them) 'framed the worlds nay, _created_ as well as framed them.

If it be granted, for the mere purpose of explanation, that Spirit is an
entity, we can frame 'clear and distinct ideas of'--a real though not
material existence, surely no man will pretend to say an uncreated
reality called Spirit, is less inexplicable than uncreated Matter. All
could not have been caused or created unless nothing can be a Cause, the
very notion of which involves the grossest of absurdities.

'Whatever is produced,' said Hume, 'without any cause, is produced by
nothing; or, in other words,