Such are the views of Newton.  Examine this course of thought, and see if it is not natural.  Observation reveals to us facts.  Facts in themselves, isolated facts, are nothing for the mind; but in the facts of nature, human reason discovers an order, and in that order it recognizes its own proper laws.  To keep within the domain of astronomy—­there is harmony between our mind and the course of the stars.  If you have any doubt about this, I appeal to the almanac.  We there find it stated that in such a month, on such a day, at such an hour, there will be an eclipse of the sun or of the moon.  How comes the editor of the almanac to know that?  He has learnt it from the savants who have succeeded in explaining the phenomena of the skies.  The savant therefore can in his study meet with the intelligence which directs the universe.  If he makes no mistake in his calculations, the eclipse begins at the precise hour which he has indicated.  If the eclipse did not take place at the instant foreseen, no one would suspect Nature of not following the course prescribed by the directing intelligence; the inference would be that there had been a fault in observation, or an error of figures on the part of the astronomer.

When science, then, does its part well, the mind of man encounters another mind which is governing the world and maintaining it in order.  The special science of nature stops there, as we shall explain further on; but this is not all that man requires, when he makes use of all his faculties.  All is passing and changing in the domain of experience; and reason seeks instinctively the cause of changeable facts in an unchangeable Being, the cause of transient phenomena in an eternal Being.  Nature, therefore, does not suffice to account to us for itself.  It demands a power to direct it, an intelligence to regulate it; an absolute eternal Being as its cause.  This is what reason imperatively requires; and when we possess the idea of God, nature reveals to us His power and His wisdom.

This is an old argument, and they call it commonplace.  It is commonplace, in fact; it has appeared over and over again in the discourses of Socrates, in the writings of Galen, of Kepler, of Newton, of Linnaeus.  Yes, this argument has fallen so low as to be public property, if we can say that truth falls when it shines with a splendor vivid enough to enlighten the masses.  If I desired to bring together here the testimony of all the savants who have seen God in nature, the song of all the poets who have celebrated the glory of the Eternal as manifested by the creation, the enumeration would be long, and I should soon tire out your patience.  You can understand therefore that if there are, as the misanthrope Rousseau says there are, philosophers who hold in such contempt vulgar opinions that they prefer error of their own discovery to truth found out by other people, then the ancient argument, which infers the wisdom of the Creator from the order of the creation, must be the object of but small esteem with them.  Still I for my part take this old argument for a good one, and I mean to defend it.