Section VIII

Summary

I have now gone through so many of the celebrated axioms concerning nature, that I hope I may reasonably presume that the other sentences of this kind (that my haste makes me leave unmentioned) will be thought capable of being fairly explicated – and with congruity to our hypothesis – by the help of the grounds already laid, since with light variations they may be easily enough improved and applied to those other particulars to which they are the most analogous.

But this intimation ought not to hinder me to make a reflection that not only is pertinent to this place, but which I desire may have retrospect upon a great part of the whole precedent discourse. And it is this: that though we could not intelligibly explicate all the particular axioms about nature and the phenomena of inanimate bodies that are thought (but not by me granted) to favour them by mechanical principles, it would not follow that we must therefore yield up the whole cause to the naturists. For we have already shown, and may do so yet further ere long, that the supposition of such a being as they call nature is far from enabling her partisans to give intelligible accounts of these and other phenomena of the universe.