Their magnitudes, numbers, physical
force, faculties, functions, duration of life, rates of multiplication
and development, sources of subsistence, must all have been determined
in exact ratios, and could not transgress certain limits without
involving the whole universe in confusion. This amazing sum of
probabilities is yet to be further augmented by the fact that all these
classes of organised substances are intimately related to those great
elements of the material world in which they live, to which they are
adapted, and which are adapted to them; that all of them are subject to
the influence of certain mighty and subtle agencies which pervade all
nature,--and which are of such tremendous potency that any chance error
in their proportions of activity would be sufficient to destroy all, and
which yet axe exquisitely balanced and inscrutably harmonised.
The proofs of design, arising from the relations thus maintained between
all the parts, from the most minute to the most vast, of our own world,
are still to be further multiplied by the inconceivably momentous
relations subsisting between our own and other planets and their common
centre; amidst whose sublime and solemn phenomena science has most
clearly discovered that everything is accurately adjusted by geometrical
precision of force and movement; where the chances of error are
infinite, and the proofs of intelligence, therefore, equal.
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