'Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least.

How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...?

What the Latins have done in this text (1 John v, 7) the Greeks have done to Paul (1 Tim. iii, 16). They now read, "Great is the mystery of godliness; God manifest in the flesh"; whereas all the churches for the first four or five hundred years, and the authors of all the ancient versions, Jerome as well as the rest, read, "Great is the mystery of godliness, which was manifest in the flesh." Our English version makes it yet a little stronger. It reads, "Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh."

To arrive at the simplest truth requires years of contemplation.

I feign no hypotheses.

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.