4 - Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences

Summary

It is in vain for me to run into a collection of stories, where the variety is infinite, and things vary as every particular man's circumstances vary …. my business is not preaching, I am making observations and reflections, let those make enlargements who read it.

Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, pp. 213–14

The just application of every incident … must legitimate all the part that may be called invention or parable in the story.

Preface to Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, p. vii

Let the Naturalists explain these Things, and the Reason and Manner of them; all I can say to them, is, to describe the Fact.

Robinson Crusoe, p. 188

Should we … say nothing of God is to be understood, because we cannot understand it? or that nothing in Nature is intelligible but what we can understand? Who can understand the reason, and much less the manner, of the needle tending to the pole by being touched with the lodestone, and by what operation the magnetic virtue is conveyed with a touch? …. Yet we see all these things in their operations and events; we know they must be reconcilable in nature, though we cannot reconcile them; and intelligible in nature, though we cannot understand them.

Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, p. 207

There was a strange concurrence … in the various providences which befel me.

Robinson Crusoe, p. 143