Nor between the ancients and the moderns; because the trial would be endless.
Nor between the Jansenists and the Molinists; because they exist no longer, and, thank God, five or six thousand volumes have become as useless as the works of St. Ephraim.
Nor between the partisans of the French and the Italian opera; because it is a mere matter of fancy.
The subject I have in mind is but a trifle—namely, the question whether there is or is not a God; and I am going to examine it in all seriousness and good faith, because it interests me, and you also.
I
OF THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION
Everything is in motion, everything acts and reacts, in nature.
Our sun turns on its axis with a rapidity that astonishes us; other suns turn with the same speed, while countless swarms of planets revolve round them in their orbits, and the blood circulates more than twenty times an hour in the lowliest of our animals.
A straw that is borne on the wind tends naturally towards the centre of the earth, just as the earth gravitates towards the sun, and the sun towards the earth. The sea owes to the same laws its eternal ebb and flow. In virtue of the same laws the vapours which form our atmosphere rise continually from the earth, and fall again in dew, rain, hail, snow, and thunder.
