that the eye was
meant for seeing, or the ear for hearing, or the heart for initiating
and regulating the circulation of the blood, or nervous ramifications
for receiving and disseminating sensible impressions. These various
organs have been discovered to be useful, and are used accordingly; but
they were not intended to be so used, or contrived with any such view,
or, indeed, contrived at all. The forces, whatever they be, and whether
identical with or totally distinct from itself, whereby matter, on one
supposition, acts, and, on the other, is acted upon, and by whose
operation the universe and all its contents have been fashioned and are
sustained, are in either case perfectly heedless and reckless forces,
operating always without the slightest reference to result.

Language like this was much in vogue among the French encyclopaedists of
the last century. By opposing it, even Voltaire incurred the reputation
of bigotry, and Hume probably had to listen to a good deal of it on that
memorable occasion when, dining with Baron D'Holbach, and intimating to
his host his disbelief in the existence of atheists, he was informed by
way of reply that he was actually at table with seventeen members of the
sect.[36] That in England, too, it was a good deal talked at about the
same and a somewhat later period, may be inferred from the fact that
against its teaching one of Paley's most celebrated treatises was
expressly directed. Doctrine which was once so fashionable, and which
even now cannot be said to be obsolete, was not, of course, without some
show of reason to support it, and somewhat in this wise the chief
arguments in its behalf were usually marshalled:--In order to account
for actual result, there is no need to imagine previous purpose. All
things that exist, all events that occur, must bear to each other some
relations in situation and time, which relations are not less likely to
be orderly than disorderly, or, rather, indeed, are more likely to be
the former than the latter. For necessarily the rarer rises above the
denser; the stronger compels the weaker; that which is pushed hardest
runs fastest. And even though, among organic forms, orderly and
disorderly had been, by the purely fortuitous concurrence of atoms,
originally produced in equal numbers, the former would be sure in the
course of ages to become the more numerous, and that in proportion to
the orderliness of their composition, and to their consequent
suitab