The Existence of God | Page 7

the fire that preserves
in us natural heat. Nor is burning the only use wood is fit for; it is a soft
though solid and durable matter, to which the hand of man gives, with
ease, all the forms he pleases for the greatest works of architecture and
navigation. Moreover, fruit trees by bending their boughs towards the
earth seem to offer their crop to man. The trees and plants, by letting
their fruit or seed drop down, provide for a numerous posterity about
them. The tenderest plant, the least of herbs and pulse are, in little, in a
small seed, all that is displayed in the highest plants and largest tree.
Earth that never changes produces all those alterations in her bosom.
SECT. XIII. Of Water.

Let us now behold what we call water. It is a liquid, clear, and
transparent body. On the one hand it flows, slips, and runs away; and
on the other it assumes all the forms of the bodies that surround it,
having properly none of its own. If water were more rarefied, or thinner,
it would be a kind of air; and so the whole surface of the earth would be
dry and sterile. There would be none but volatiles; no living creature
could swim; no fish could live; nor would there be any traffic by
navigation. What industrious and sagacious hand has found means to
thicken the water, by subtilising the air, and so well to distinguish those
two sorts of fluid bodies? If water were somewhat more rarefied, it
could no longer sustain those prodigious floating buildings, called ships.
Bodies that have the least ponderosity would presently sink under water.
Who is it that took care to frame so just a configuration of parts, and so
exact a degree of motion, as to make water so fluid, so penetrating, so
slippery, so incapable of any consistency: and yet so strong to bear, and
so impetuous to carry off and waft away, the most unwieldy bodies? It
is docile; man leads it about as a rider does a well- managed horse. He
distributes it as he pleases; he raises it to the top of steep mountains,
and makes use of its weight to let it fall, in order to rise again, as high
as it was at first. But man who leads waters with such absolute
command is in his turn led by them. Water is one of the greatest
moving powers that man can employ to supply his defects in the most
necessary arts, either through the smallness or weakness of his body.
But the waters which, notwithstanding their fluidity, are such
ponderous bodies, do nevertheless rise above our heads, and remain a
long while hanging there. Do you see those clouds that fly, as it were,
on the wings of the winds? If they should fall, on a sudden, in watery
pillars, rapid like a torrent, they would drown and destroy everything
where they should happen to fall, and the other grounds would remain
dry. What hand keeps them in those pendulous reservatories, and
permits them to fall only by drops as if they distilled through a
gardener's watering-pot? Whence comes it that in some hot countries,
where scarce any rain ever falls, the nightly dews are so plentiful that
they supply the want of rain; and that in other countries, such as the
banks of the Nile and Ganges, the regular inundation of rivers, at
certain seasons of the year, never fails to make up what the inhabitants
are deficient in for the watering of the ground? Can one imagine

measures better concerted to render all countries fertile and fruitful?
Thus water quenches, not only the thirst of men, but likewise of arid
lands: and He who gave us that fluid body has carefully distributed it
throughout the earth, like pipes in a garden. The waters fall from the
tops of mountains where their reservatories are placed. They gather into
rivulets in the bottom of valleys. Rivers run in winding streams through
vast tracts of land, the better to water them; and, at last, they precipitate
themselves into the sea, in order to make it the centre of commerce for
all nations. That ocean, which seems to be placed in the midst of lands,
to make an eternal separation between them, is, on the contrary, the
common rendezvous of all the people of the earth, who could not go by
land from one end of the world to the other without infinite fatigue,
tedious journeys, and numberless dangers. It is by that trackless road,
across the bottomless deep, that the whole world shakes hands with the
new; and that the new supplies the old with so many conveniences and
riches. The waters, distributed with so much art, circulate in the earth,