The Religion of Nature Delineated

I have shown in what the nature of moral good and evil consists: viz. a conformity or disagreement to truth, and those things that are coincident with it, reason and happiness; also, how truth is discovered: by sense, or reason, or both. I shall now specify some of those truths which are of greatest importance and influence, and require more reasoning to discover them; leaving the rest (common matters of fact) to the common ways of finding them. They respect principally either the Deity, or ourselves, or the rest of mankind. The first sort are the subject of this section.

I. Where there is a subordination of causes and effects, there must necessarily be a cause in nature prior to the rest, uncaused. Or thus, Where there is a series, in which the existence of one thing depends upon another, the existence of this again upon same other, and so upwards, as the case shall be, there must be some independent being, upon whom it does originally depend.