ficiently refuted in what we have seen already; as also by what is affirmed of Thales, the first among the Greeks who travelled into that country in search of natural philosophy, and maintained, that there is no suck thing as a vacuum in the world. Plutarch, who informs us of this, adds upon the occasion, that all philosophers, but the Atomists, who denied a Providence, agreed in this doc trine*.

CHAP. V.

The Sentiments of the most eminent of the modern Writers, subjoined to those of the Ancients,

INCE the supposed discovery of a va

SINCE

cuum, some have confidently affirmed, that natural effects are no way to be accounted for, but by the power of the Deity immediately interested; and either the reason of man, or the reason of things, is so altered, that what did serve formerly as a ground

De placit. philos. 1. 18.

ground-work to atheism, is now recommended as the only sure foundation of natural religion; as if it were impossible for God to act by secondary causes, without tempting us to believe, that such causes were able to contrive and frame a world without his interposition. Those who object to second causes, upon any pretensions to religious motives, must imagine surely, that matter, if there is but enough of it, can move, act, and think, by its own nature. If it cannot, we are in no danger of excluding a divine power, by filling the heavens with a fluid medium: if we suspect that it can, then we make ourselves materialists, that is atheists, in order to confute atheism more effectually. So that this triumph of natural religion over atheism, is either affected, to serve some hypothesis, or grounded upon too hasty judgment of things.

An infallible criterion of simple and absolute atheism, is the exclusion of final causes. If you can fix upon two or three of these, which are clear and beyond dispute, as that the eye does not see by accident, but was contrived for seeing, and such like, you answer all the atheists that ever were or ever will be; who are no better than sots and

ideots,

ideots, if they can stand out against the testimony of their own senses. For you prove, by a single step of reasoning, that there is a divine mind or wisdom, that hath wrought with a view to certain ends, which it hath attained in the most perfect manner. This topic is well pursued by Cicero, in a beautiful and masterly draught of the wisdom and design that appears in the various works of the creation. It makes a consi derable part of the second book de natura deorum: and, in my opinion, this discourse, so far as it is a confutation of atheism, is abundantly sufficient for that purpose, and complete enough in its argument, without any farther additions.

But all this, though unexceptionable and unanswerable, is obvious (as it ought to be) to every capacity: it is plain, easy, and old-fashioned; therefore all men are not pleased with it. If you will follow their new prescription, you must bring yourself, in the first place, to believe a vacuum; the steps to which are not understood by one in a thousand then you are to remove the notion of actio in distans, which in the last age had some great authorities on its side:

then

then you arrive at this conclusion, though not without a considerable stride, that God himself is the sole agent, to whose immediate power, exclusive of all secondary agents, the lowest effects in the world are to be imputed. And if these things are so, then it follows, that there is a God, and you triumph over atheism. But in the mean time, if your foundations should be weak, and experiment should overthrow your arguments for a vacuum, the capital truth of natural religion, as you have contrived to state the matter, will be in a very precarious situation. No good, therefore, can accrue to religion, from this method of confuting atheism; and some danger is always to be apprehended from new and empirical projects in divinity.

Of this the excellent Lord Bacon w.s truly sensible; and there is not, in the whole course of his writing, so heavy a censure, as that which he thought proper to pass upon the error now before us, "Certain it is, (say's he) "that God worketh nothing in "NATURE but by SECOND CAUSES: "and if they would have it otherwise be"lieved, it is mere imposture, as it were in

"favour

"favour towards God; and nothing else "but to offer to the author of truth, the "unclean sacrifice of a lie*."

It is observed by the same author, with that brightness of expression so familiar to him upon all occasions, that "heat and cold "are nature's two hands, whereby she chiefly "worketh t." The nature of cold, in particular, he proposes as a thing worthy the inquisition" both for use and disclosure of "CAUSES." And he does not seem to have believed that cold is a mere privation of substance, but rather that it is "active "and transitive into bodies adjacent, as well "as heat §." Gilbert, the magnetic philosopher, having possessed himself, as he thought, of an attractio in distans, had published the doctrine of an absolute vacuum in the spaces between the celestial orbs. The Lord Bacon, on the other hand, had formed to himself "a theory, according to which, all space is filled either with an "acrial or fiery nature ." He denied also, "that

* Adv. of Learn. p. 5.

+ Nat. Hist. Cent. I. No. 69,

Ibid. $ Ibid.

|| Theoria nostra negat vacuum illud coacervatum Gil, berti inter globos sparsos, sed spatia vel aëreâ vel flammea maturâ repleri, Thema Coeli,