"What a modern talks of by the name, Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does not figure as a divine thing; not even as one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine enough,—saleable, curious, good for propelling steam-ships! With our Sciences and Cyclopædias, we are apt to forget the divineness, in those laboratories of ours. We ought not to forget it! That once well forgotten, I know not what else were worth remembering."—Carlyle. Heroes.
"Two worlds, the one intellectual, the other sensual, were equally given to us from the beginning, and all attempts to deduce them from one principle (except the Deity) have failed."—Von Feuchtersleben.
"What am I? how produced? and for what end?
Whence drew I being? to what period tend?
Am I th' abandon'd orphan of blind chance?
Dropped by wild atoms in disorder'd dance?
Or from an endless chain of causes wrought,
And of unthinking substance, born with thought?
By motion which began without a Cause,
Supremely wise, without design or laws."—Arbuthnot.