from race to race, for realities; a tyrannical
power maintained him in his notions, because by those alone could
society be enslaved. It was in vain, that some faint glimmerings of
Nature occasionally attempted, the recall of his reason; that slight
corruscations of experience sometimes threw his darkness into light; the
interest of the few was bottomed on his enthusiasm; their pre-eminence
depended on his love of the wonderful; their very existence rested on
the solidity of his ignorance they consequently suffered no opportunity
to escape, of smothering even the lambent flame. The many were thus
first deceived into credulity, then coerced into submission. At length,
the whole science of man became a confused mass of darkness, falsehood,
and contradictions, with here and there a feeble ray of truth, furnished
by that Nature of which he can never entirely divest himself, because,
without his knowledge, his necessities are continually bringing him back
to her resources."

Having stated that by "nature" he means the "great whole," our author
complains of those who assert that matter is senseless, inanimate,
unintelligent, etc., and says, "Experience proves to us that the matter
which we regard as inert or dead, assumes action, intelligence, and
life, when it is combined in a certain way:"--

"If flour be wetted with water, and the mixture closed up, it will be
found, after some little lapse of time, by the aid of a microscope, to
have produced organized beings that enjoy life, of which the water and
the flour were believed incapable: it is thus that inanimate matter can
pass into life, or animate matter, which is in itself only an assemblage
of motion. Reasoning from analogy, which the philosophers of the present
day hold perfectly compatible, the production of a man, independent of
the ordinary means, would not be more marvellous than that of an insect
with flour and water. Fermentation and putrefaction evidently produce
living animals. We have here the principle; with proper materials,
principles can always be brought into action. That generation which is
styled _equivocal_ is only so for those who do not reflect, or who
do not permit themselves, attentively, to observe the operations of
Nature."

This passage is much ridiculed by Voltaire, who asserts that it is
founded on some experiments made by one Needham, who placed some
rye-meal in well-corked bottles, and some boiled mutton gravy in other
bottles, and found th