Leads the willing and drags the unwilling.

But does this undeniable truth make against Atheism?  Far from it—­so far, indeed, as to make for it:  the reason is no mystery.  Of matter we have ideas clear, precise, and indispensable, whereas, of something not matter we cannot have any idea whatever, good, bad, or indifferent.  The Universe is extraordinary, no doubt, but so much of it as acts upon us is perfectly conceivable, whereas, any thing within, without, or apart from the Universe is perfectly inconceivable.

The notion of necessarily existing matter seems to the Author of this Apology fatal to belief in God; that is, if by the word God be understood something not matter, for ’tis precisely because priests were unable to reconcile such belief with the idea of matter’s self-existence or eternity, that they took to imagining a ‘First Cause.’  In the ‘forlorn hope’ of clearing the difficulty of necessarily existing matter, they assent to a necessarily existing spirit; and when the nature of spirit is demanded from these assertors of its existence they are constrained to avow that it is material or nothing.

Yes, they are constrained to make directly or indirectly one or other of these admissions; for, as between truth and falsehood there is no middle passage, so between something and nothing there is no intermediate existence.  Hence the serious dilemma of Spiritualists, who gravely tell us their God is a Spirit, and that a Spirit is not any thing, which not any thing or nothing (for the life of us we cannot distinguish between them) ’framed the worlds nay, created as well as framed them.

If it be granted, for the mere purpose of explanation, that Spirit is an entity, we can frame ’clear and distinct ideas of’—­a real though not material existence, surely no man will pretend to say an uncreated reality called Spirit, is less inexplicable than uncreated Matter.  All could not have been caused or created unless nothing can be a Cause, the very notion of which involves the grossest of absurdities.

‘Whatever is produced,’ said Hume, ’without any cause, is produced by nothing; or, in other words, has nothing for its cause.  But nothing never can be a cause no more than it can be something or equal to two right angles.  By the same intuition that we perceive nothing not to be equal to two right angles, or not to be something, we perceive that it can never be a cause and consequently must perceive that every object has a real cause, of its existence.  When we exclude all causes we really do exclude them, and neither suppose nothing nor the object itself to be the causes of the existence, and consequently can draw no argument from the absurdity of these suppositions to prove the absurdity of that exclusion.  If everything must have a cause, it follows that upon the exclusion of other causes we must accept of the object itself or nothing as causes.  But it is the very point in question whether everything must have a cause or not, and therefore, according to all just reasoning ought not to be taken for granted. [40:1]