The Religion of Nature Delineated quotes

(and I may add: consequently denied those propositions which affirm him to be the Christ, a teacher of true religion, and the like)?

When a man lives as if he had the estate which he has not, or was in other regards (all fairly cast up) what he is not, what judgment is to be passed upon him? Does not his whole conduct breathe untruth? May we not say (if the propriety of language permits), that he lives a lie?

In common speech we say some actions are insignificant, which would not be sense if there were not some that are significant, that have a tendency and meaning. And this is as much as can be said of articulate sounds:

So very much are those gentlemen mistaken, who by following nature mean only complying with their bodily inclinations, though in opposition to truth or at least without any regard to it.

Truth is but a conformity to nature, and to follow nature cannot be to combat truth.

If there is a supreme being, upon whom the existence of the world depends, and nothing can be in it but what He either causes or permits to be, then to own things to be as they are is to own what He causes, or …

… poor man’s single ewe-lamb out of his bosom, reckoned the poor man’s loss to be not greater than the loss of one of his lambs would have been to him, he must be very defective in moral arithmetic, and little understood the doctrine of proportion.

Every man’s happiness is his happiness, what it is to him; and the loss of it is answerable to the degrees of his perception, to his manner of taking things, to his wants and circumstances.

Observation 5: How judicious and wary ought princes, lawgivers, judges, juries, and even masters to be!

Observation 8: The sufferings of brutes are not like the sufferings of men. They perceive by moments, without reflection upon past or future, upon causes, circumstances, etc.

Time and life without thinking are next neighbors to nothing: to no-time and no-life.

And therefore, to kill a brute is to deprive him of a life, or a remainder of time, that is equal to little more than nothing: though this may perhaps be more applicable to some animals than to others.

If a strolling wolf should light upon a lamb, it is not evidently known that he will tear the lamb, but there is such a natural propension in that kind to do it, that nobody would much question the event.

(This instance might have been taken from amongst men, who are generally, as far as they can be, wolves one to another.)

If a parent causes his child to be instructed in the foundations of useful learning, educates him virtuously, and gives him his first impulse and direction in the way to true happiness, he will be more likely to proceed and continue in it, than he …

Not understanding in what the nature and force of a just consequence consists.

Nothing more common than to hear people assert that such a thing follows from such a thing, when it does not follow

: i.e., when such a consequence is founded in no axiom, no theorem, no truth that we know of.

Want of refinement, and the practice of thinking and reasoning by ourselves. A rambling and irregular life must be attended with a loose and irregular head, ill-connected notions, and fortuitous conclusions.

Truth is the offspring of silence, unbroken meditations, and thoughts often revised and corrected.

The strength of appetites, passions, prejudices. For by these the understanding may be corrupted, or overborne;

… if they happen to be in the wrong, the more they study, and the more learning they get, the more they are confirmed in their errors, and having set out with their backs upon truth, the further they go, the more they recede from it.

Their knowledge is a kind of negative quantity, so much worse or less than no knowledge.

Of this sort there are many, and very few indeed (with respect to the bulk of mankind) whose determinations and tenets were ever in the form of questions;

It must be compounded with a motion of projection, to keep the planet from falling directly into the sun, and bring it about; and from what hand, I desire to know, comes this other motion (or direction)? Who impressed it?

What a vast field for contemplation is here opened! Such regions of matter about us, in which there is not the least particle that does not carry with it an argument of God’s existence; not the least stick or straw, or other trifle that falls to the ground, but shows it; not the slightest motion produced, the least whisper of the air, but tells it.

XIV.

and, as to the substances themselves of all these things, and their internal constitution, they are hid from our eyes.

Our philosophy dwells in the surface of nature.

However, in the next place, we ourselves cannot but be witnesses that there are stated methods, as so many set forms of proceeding, which things punctually and religiously keep to. The same causes, circumstanced in the same manner, have always the same success;

and this, again, is the same as to say it is impossible to happen, since if there be a possibility that it may happen, the hazard is not infinite. The world therefore cannot be the child of chance.

He must be little acquainted with the works of nature, who is not sensible how delicate and fine they are; and the finer they are, the grosser were those of Epicurus.

If it should be objected that many things seem to be useless, many births are monstrous, or the like, such answers as these may be made: The uses of some things are known to some men, and not to others;

… as the offices and uses and wants of the several beings require, through such an immense extent, should be the effect of chance only, is a conceit so prodigiously absurd that certainly no one can espouse it heartily, who understands the meaning of that word.

“Chance” seems to be only a term by which we express our ignorance of the cause of anything.

For when we say anything comes “by chance,” we do not mean that it had no other cause, but only that we do not know the true cause which produced it, or interposed in such a manner as to make that fall out which was …

Must clouds be so precipitated, or kept in suspense, as the case of a particular man or two requires? To which, add that the differing, and many times contrary interests of men are scarce to be reconciled.

The wind which carries one into the port, drives another back to sea; and the rains that are but just sufficient upon the hills, may drown the inhabitants of the valleys.

In short, may we expect miracles, or can there be a particular providence, a providence that suits the several cases and prayers of individuals, without a continual repetition of them, and force frequently committed upon the laws of nature and the freedom of intelligent agents?

And thus prescience and freedom are inconsistent. But sure the nature of a thing is not changed by being known, or known beforehand. For if it is known truly, it is known to be what it is, and therefore is not altered by this.

The truth is, God foresees, or rather sees the actions of free agents, because they will be⁠—not that they will be because He foresees them.

If I see an object in a certain place, the veracity of my faculties supposed, it is certain that object is there;

that is, Caesar and the conqueror of Pompey are the same thing; and Caesar is as much known by the one designation as by the other.

The amount then is only this: that the conqueror of Pompey conquered Pompey; or somebody conquered Pompey; or rather, since Pompey is as little known now as Caesar, somebody conquered somebody.

Such a poor business is this boasted immortality, and such as has been here described is the thing called “glory” among us!

These considerations have caused me many times to wonder at those men who dispute against preconceived forms of prayer.

They, who talk so much of the spirit of prayer, seem to know but little of it.

As to the posture, that is best which best expresses our humility, reverence, and earnestness, and affects us most.

and whatever falls upon him, from the opposition made by the defending party, is but the effect of his own act: or, it is that violence of which he is the author, reflected back upon himself.

It is as when a man spits at heaven, and the spittle falls back upon his own face.

Since he who begins to violate the happiness of another, does what is wrong, he who endeavors to obviate or put a stop to that violence, does in that respect what is right, by the terms.

One can scarce know the sufferings of another without having at least some image of them in his mind: nor can one have these images without being conscious of them and, as it were, feeling them.

Next to suffering itself is to carry the representation of it about with one.

So that he who is not affected with the calamities of others, so far as they fall within his knowledge, may be said to know and not to know, or at least to cancel his knowledge, and contradict his own conscience.

If the one be a defect of humanity, the other is diametrically opposite to it. If the one does no good, the other does much evil.

And no man, how cruel soever in reality he was, has ever liked to be reckoned a cruel man: such a confession of guilt does nature extort, so universally does it reject, condemn, abhor this character.

XVIII. The practice of justice and mercy is just as right, as injustice, unmercifulness, and cruelty are wrong. This follows from the nature of contraries. Besides, not to be just to a man is to be not just, or unjust, to him;

So far are they, rightly managed, from being mere infirmities.

And certainly the philosopher who pretends to absolute apathy maims nature, and sets up for a half-man, or I don’t know what.

I must confess, however, that our passions are so very apt to grow upon us and become exorbitant, if they are not kept under an exact discipline, that by way of prevention or caution it is advisable rather to affect a degree of apathy, or …

It may be collected, even from experience, that the virtuous life compared with the contrary (if one looks no further than the present state) is the happier life; or, that the virtuous pleasures, when the whole account is made up, are the truer.

Who sees not that the vicious life is full of dangers and solicitudes, and usually ends ill: perhaps in rottenness and rags, or at least in a peevish and despicable discontent?

I am not of opinion that virtue can make a man happy upon a rack, under a violent fit of the stone, or the like;

and this does not at all look like motion merely material (or, in which matter is only concerned), which is all mechanical.

Who can imagine matter to be moved by arguments, or ever placed syllogisms and demonstrations among levers and pulleys?

We not only move ourselves upon reasons which we find in ourselves, but upon reasons imparted by words or writing from others, or perhaps merely at their desire or bare suggestion.

And, if there is any reason to believe that at the death of every man there is always such a particular annihilation, let him that knows it produce it.

Certainly to reduce any substance into nothing requires just the same power as to convert nothing into something: and, I fancy, they who deny the immortality of the soul will be cautious how they admit any such power.

If the soul could be material—that is, if there could be any matter that might be the subject of those faculties of thinking, willing, etc.—yet still, since we cannot but be sensible that all these are faculties of the selfsame thing, and that all the …

and why should not those impressions which affected the nerves that moved and affected the vehicle and soul in it, affect the vehicle immediately when they are immediately made upon it, without the interposition of the nerves?

The hand, which feels an object at the end of a staff, may certainly be allowed to feel the same much better by immediate contact, without the staff.

Nay, why should we not think that it may admit of more objects and the knowledge of more things than it can now, since, being exposed all round to the influences of them, it may be moved not only by visible objects just at the …

and, to finish this detail (hideous indeed, but too true) as fast as I can, consider the many massacres, persecutions, and miseries consequent upon them, which false religion has caused, authorized, sanctified.

Indeed the history of mankind is little else but the history of uncomfortable, dreadful passages

: and a great part of it, however things are palliated and gilded over, is scarcely to be read by a good-natured man without amazement, horror, tears.

Let us consider it a little. Not to mention what we must suffer from the very settlement and condition of this world by hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and indispositions; like leaves one generation drops, and another springs up, to fall again, and be forgotten.

As we come into the world with the labor of our mothers, we soon go out of it with our own.

Childhood and youth are much of them lost in insensibility or trifling, vanity and rudeness; obnoxious to many pains and accidents; and, when they are spent in the best manner, are attended with labor and discipline.

Are not debauching, getting per fas aut nefas, defaming one another, erecting tyrannies of one kind or other, propagating empty and senseless opinions with bawling and fury, the great business of this world? And are not all these contrary to reason?

Can anyone then, with reason, imagine that reason should be given, though it were but to a few, only to be run down and trampled upon and then extinguished?

May we not rather conclude that there must be some world where reason will have its turn, and prevail and triumph? Some kingdom of reason to come?

May we not rather conclude that there must be some world where reason will have its turn, and prevail and triumph?

Some kingdom of reason to come?

In the last place, that great expectation which men have of continuing to live in another state beyond the grave, has, I suppose, been commonly admitted as one proof that they shall live, and does seem indeed to me to add some weight to what …

none of which things can be said of these clods, or those brutes.

Can I then be designed for nothing further than just to eat, drink, sleep, walk about, and act upon this earth

: that is, to have no further being than what these brutes have, so far beneath me?

… walks, when I close these lids, and yonder blue regions and all this scene darken upon me and go out—must I then only serve to furnish dust to be mingled with the ashes of these herds and plants, or with this dirt under my feet?

Have I been set so far above them in life, only to be leveled with them at death?

” This argument grows stronger in the apprehension of one who is conscious of abilities and intellectual improvements which he has had no opportunity, here, of showing and using: through want of health, want of confidence, want of proper place, want of liberty.