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For some thousands of years man's attention has been drawn to the contemplation of the phenomena of nature , and successive ages have added to our
information in such proportion , that the knowledge of preceding times has seemed but a little glooming knowledge mucli like an ignorance . ^* Pythagoras conjectured that the earth went round the sun .
Subsequent discoveries confirmed the theory , and what was deemed impious scepticism came to be considered an established truth . The distance of the sun from the earth was reduced to
figures , which expressed a sum scarcely perceptible , from its enormousness , to human faculties . The distance of the stars was found to exceed this by a proportion not more
appreciable . The milk which gushed from the deep bosom of the goddess , when the strenuous infant rested from his gulping , was found to be made of stars ,
of suns , in pairs , in triplets , and in groupes . Every advance in the practice of optics shows us a region , in comparison to which the one we had
previously known proves but a miniature . The myriad-sunned boundary of our so-called " universe " now seems but the frame and exterior of one
among a host of individuals : it is no longer the ifirmament , but one of multitudes , and not the
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vastest among its race . Balkeccc in the desire to reach a finakli boundary , the mind leaps for- * - ward , anticipates the space thatt is to be realized at the nextt
change in optical practice , andl consoles its unsatisfied yearning for an end , by assuming that there is none ; am assumption more rational tham assumptions generally are . But if we arrive at the
conclusion that space outwardsif the term be precise enough to be allowed—is infinite , we find it no less infinite inwardly . The drop of water is a sea to the gigantic monsters which infest it , and withal so fertile that even they can no more
depopulate it than the less horrid devastators of the Atlantic . What must be the size of that object which to their prey seems small . Yet we cannot but believe that myriads of creatures surround these——who were themselves latent to
our sight until recent improvements of the microscope—unseen , unguessed at , a microscopic world beyond the world of our microscope . Thus outwards and inwards
we are driven to the conclusion that space is infinite . But as nothing which is subject to the strict examination by our senses is found desert , nothing in fact but what is teemiug with life , in endless varieties , subsisting upon one another—as if even
• « The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise . ' A Fragment . By Charles Cabbage , Esq . 8 vo . pp . 244 . John Murray , f " A little glooming light , much like a shade . " , —SrEN « R .
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The Purposes of Natural Theology Mistaken . 1235
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THE PURPOSES OF NATURAL THEOLOGY MISTAKEN **
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 1, 1837, page 1233, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1834/page/51/
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