“I conjecture then,” continues Saunderson, enlarging the idea of the possibilities of matter and motion, “that in the beginning when matter in fermentation gradually brought our universe bursting into being, blind creatures like myself were very common.  But why should I not believe of worlds what I believe of animals?  How many worlds, mutilated and imperfect, were peradventure dispersed, then re-formed, and are again dispersing at each moment of time in those far-off spaces which I cannot touch and you cannot behold, but where motion combines and will continue to combine masses of matter, until they have chanced on some arrangement in which they may finally persevere!  O philosophers, transport yourselves with me on to the confines of the universe, beyond the point where I feel, and you see, organised beings; gaze over that new ocean, and seek across its lawless, aimless heavings some vestiges of that intelligent Being whose wisdom strikes you with such wonder here!

“What is this world?  A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions.  All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment.  I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days.  You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours.  The world is eternal for you, as you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant.  Yet the insect is the more reasonable of the two.  For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity!  What an immeasurable tradition!  Yet shall we all pass away, without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space, or the precise time that we shall have endured.  Time, matter, space—­all, it may be, are no more than a point."[71]

Diderot sent a copy of his work to Voltaire.  The poet replied with his usual playful politeness, but declared his dissent from Saunderson, “who denied God, because he happened to have been born blind."[72] More pretentious, and infinitely less acute critics than Voltaire, have fixed on the same point in the argument and met it by the same answer; namely, that, blind as he was, Saunderson ought to have recognised an intelligent Being who had provided him with so many substitutes for sight; he ought to have inferred a skilful demiurgus from those ordered relations in the universe, which Thought, independently of Vision, might well have disclosed to him.  In truth, this is not the centre of the whole argument.  When Saunderson implies that he could only admit a God on condition that he could touch him, he makes a single sense the channel of all possible ideas, and the arbiter of all reasoned combinations of ideas.  This is absurd, and Diderot, as we have seen, rapidly passed