Suppose a traveller entering Saida, the country where the ancient
Thebes, with a hundred gates, stood formerly, and which is now a
desert, should find there columns, pyramids, obelisks, and
inscriptions in unknown characters. Would he presently say: men
never inhabited this place; no human hand had anything to do here;
it is chance that formed these columns, that placed them on their
pedestals, and crowned them with their capitals, with such just
proportions; it is chance that so firmly jointed the pieces that
make up these pyramids; it is chance that cut the obelisks in one
single stone, and engraved in them these characters? Would he not,
on the contrary, say, with all the certainty the mind of man is
capable of: these magnificent ruins are the remains of a noble and
majestical architecture that flourished in ancient Egypt? This is
what plain reason suggests, at the first cast of the eye, or first
sight, and without reasoning. It is the same with the bare prospect
of the universe. A man may by vain, long-winded, preposterous
reasonings confound his own reason and obscure the clearest notions:
but the single cast of the eye is decisive. Such a work as the
world is never makes itself of its own accord. There is more art
and proportion in the bones, tendons, veins, arteries, nerves, and
muscles, that compose man's body, than in all the architecture of
the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. The single eye of the least of
living creatures surpasses the mechanics of all the most skilful
artificers.
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