controversy?  No man can deny the analogies between the effects:  To restrain ourselves from inquiring concerning the causes is scarcely possible.  From this inquiry, the legitimate conclusion is, that the causes have also an analogy:  And if we are not contented with calling the first and supreme cause a god or deity, but desire to vary the expression; what can we call him but mind or thought, to which he is justly supposed to bear a considerable resemblance?

All men of sound reason are disgusted with verbal disputes, which abound so much in philosophical and theological inquiries; and it is found, that the only remedy for this abuse must arise from clear definitions, from the precision of those ideas which enter into any argument, and from the strict and uniform use of those terms which are employed.  But there is a species of controversy, which, from the very nature of language and of human ideas, is involved in perpetual ambiguity, and can never, by any precaution or any definitions, be able to reach a reasonable certainty or precision.  These are the controversies concerning the degrees of any quality or circumstance.  Men may argue to all eternity, whether Hannibal be a great, or a very great, or a superlatively great man, what degree of beauty Cleopatra possessed, what epithet of praise livy or Thucydides is entitled to, without bringing the controversy to any determination.  The disputants may here agree in their sense, and differ in the terms, or vice versa; yet never be able to define their terms, so as to enter into each other’s meaning:  Because the degrees of these qualities are not, like quantity or number, susceptible of any exact mensuration, which may be the standard in the controversy.  That the dispute concerning Theism is of this nature, and consequently is merely verbal, or perhaps, if possible, still more incurably ambiguous, will appear upon the slightest inquiry.  I ask the Theist, if he does not allow, that there is a great and immeasurable, because incomprehensible difference between the human and the divine mind:  The more pious he is, the more readily will he assent to the affirmative, and the more will he be disposed to magnify the difference:  He will even assert, that the difference is of a nature which cannot be too much magnified.  I next turn to the Atheist, who, I assert, is only nominally so, and can never possibly be in earnest; and I ask him, whether, from the coherence and apparent sympathy in all the parts of this world, there be not a certain degree of analogy among all the operations of Nature, in every situation and in every age; whether the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal, and the structure of human thought, be not energies that probably bear some remote analogy to each other:  It is impossible he can deny it:  He will readily acknowledge it.  Having obtained this concession, I push him still further in his retreat; and I ask him, if it be not probable,