Note 54 — NOTES.1

“All these evidences of a creator, repeated thousands ... of times ... are self-evident only to the anti-Pyrrhonians.” La Mettrie holds an opinion contrary not only to that of Descartes and Locke, but also to that of Toland, Hobbes, and Condillac. Descartes, for instance, says: “Thus I very clearly see that the certitude and truth of all science depends on the knowledge alone of the true God.”63 Hobbes asserts: “For he that from any effect he seeth come to pass should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, ... shall at last come to this, that there must be, as even the heathen philosophers confessed, one first mover, that is a first and an eternal cause of all things, which is that which men mean by the name of God.”64 Toland’s words are: “All the jumbling of atoms, all the Chances you can suppose for it, could not bring the Parts of the Universe into their present Order, nor continue them in the same, nor cause the Organization of a Flower or a Fly.... The Infinity of Matter ... excludes ... an extended corporeal God, but not a pure Spirit or immaterial Being.”65 Condillac writes: “A first cause, independent, unique, infinite, eternal, omnipotent, immutable, intelligent, free, and whose providence extends over all things: that is the most perfect notion of God that we can form in this life.”66 Locke declares: “From what has been said it is plain to me we have a more certain knowledge of the existence of a God than of anything our senses have not immediately discovered to us. Nay I presume I may say, that we more certainly know that there is a God, than that there is anything else without us.”67