By one of those mystifications which make the French polemical literature of the eighteenth century the despair of bibliographers, Diderot cites as his authority a Life of Saunderson, by Dr. Inchlif.  He sets forth the title with great circumstantiality, but no such book exists or ever did exist.  The Royal Society of London, however, took the jest of fathering atheism on one of its members in bad part, and Diderot was systematically excluded from the honour of admission to that learned body, as he was excluded all his life from the French Academy.

The reasoning which Diderot puts into the professor’s mouth is at first a fervid enlargement of the text, that the argument drawn from the wonders of nature is very weak evidence for blind men.  Our power of creating new objects, so to speak, by means of a little mirror, is far more incomprehensible to them, than the stars which they have been condemned never to behold.  The luminous ball that moves from east to west through the heavens, is a less astonishing thing to them than the fire on the hearth which they can lessen or augment at pleasure.[68] “Why talk to me,” says Saunderson, “of all that fine spectacle which has never been made for me?  I have been condemned to pass my life in darkness; and you cite marvels that I cannot understand, and that are only evidence for you and for those who see as you do.  If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.”  The minister replied that the sense of touch ought to be enough to reveal the divinity to him in the admirable mechanism of his organs.  To this, Saunderson:—­“I repeat, all that is not as fine for me as it is for you.  But the animal mechanism, even were it as perfect as you pretend, and as I daresay it is—­what has it in common with a Being of sovereign intelligence?  If it fills you with astonishment, that is perhaps because you are in the habit of treating as a prodigy anything that strikes you as being beyond your own strength.  I have been myself so often an object of admiration for you, that I have a poor opinion of what surprises you.  I have attracted people from all parts of England, who could not conceive by what means I could work at geometry.  Well, you must agree that such persons had not very exact notions about the possibility of things.  Is a phenomenon in our notions beyond the power of man?  Then we instantly say—­’Tis the handiwork of a God.  Nothing short of that can content our vanity.  Why can we not contrive to throw into our talk less pride and more philosophy?  If nature offers us some knot that is hard to untie, let us leave it for what it is; do not let us employ for cutting it the hand of a Being, who then immediately becomes in turn a new knot for us, and a knot harder to untie than the first.  An Indian tells you that our globe is suspended in the air on the back of an elephant.  And the elephant!  It stands on a tortoise.  And the tortoise? what sustains that?...  You pity the Indian:  and yet one might very well say to you as to him—­Mr. Holmes, my good friend, confess your ignorance, and spare me elephant and tortoise."[69]