Is it not passing strange that such a dreamy argumentation as this--and it is a fair sample of Dr. Clarke's extended work on the existence of the Deity--should have been regarded as sound logic by many of the acutest minds, and that a majority even of the ablest metaphysicians, up almost to the present day, should have felt satisfied with it? A few minds, indeed, long ago perceived its fallacy, among whom was Alexander Pope, who thus sarcastically describes it:--
"Be that my task, replies a gloomy Clarke, Sworn foe to mystery, yet divinely dark. Let others creep by timid steps and slow, On plain experience lay foundation low, By common sense to common notions bred, And last to nature's cause through nature led, All-seeing in thy mists, we need no guide, Mother of arrogance, and source of pride! We nobly take the high _priori_ road, And reason downward till we doubt of God." _Dunciad_, Book IV.
It is impossible, on this occasion, to go into a formal refutation of this famous argument. But this is unnecessary; since, as Dr. Chalmers says, it "has fallen into utter disesteem and desuetude." Indeed, the language of Dr. Thomas Brown on this subject is not too severe, when he says, that he "conceives the abstract arguments that have been adduced to show that it is impossible for matter to have existed from eternity, by reasoning on what has been termed necessary existence, and the incompatibility of this necessary existence with the qualities of matter, to be relics of the mere verbal logic of the schools, as little capable of producing conviction as any of the wildest and most absurd of the technical scholastic reasonings on the properties, or supposed properties, of entity and nonentity."
In the second place, it has been argued with much apparent plausibility, by Dr. Paley, that wherever we find a complicated organic structure, adapted to produce beneficial results, its origin must be sought beyond itself; and since the world abounds with such organisms, it cannot be eternal; that is, the mere existence of animals and plants proves their non-eternity.
Now, without asserting that there is no force in this argument, I have two remarks to make upon it. The first is, to quote the reply to it, which such a writer as David Hume has given, in language which I have just repeated. "For aught we can know _a priori_," says he, "matter may contain the source or spring of order originally within itself, as well as mind does; and there is no more difficulty in conceiving that the several elements, from an internal unknown cause, may fall into the most exquisite arrangement, than to conceive that their ideas in the great universal mind, from a like internal unknown cause, fall into that arrangement. To say that the different ideas, which compose the reason of the Supreme, fall into order of themselves, and by their own nature, is really to talk without any precise meaning. If it has a meaning, I would fain know why it is not as good sense to say, that the parts of the material world fall into order of themselves and by their own nature. Can the one opinion be intelligible while the other is not so?"