8s An Essay on the

dered, and thence that the motion of the ani-mal spirits, or of any other matter we pleaseto fancy in the body, is likewise disordered.-How much is this able to perform ? If orderCan do nothing, disorder can do less. In aregular motion of the fluids (or of any otherparticles of matter which they may be sup-posed to move) the scenes of vision shouldgo on regularly, mechanically, constantly;and such images only should be representedwhose traces were still in the brain, and mostpatent there. Now in the disordered motionof these fluids the scenes exhibited shouldstill be the fame scenes , but only broken anddisordered. This is a just inference; yet itis far from being the cafe. Could the dis-order of inert particles of matter, makethem jump into the regular formation ofsomething they could never otherwise haverepresented, so as to imitate a£iion y life } andeven reason f This would in effect be Epi-curus’s dance of atoms! We might as wellsuppose that the small particles of dust,which are carried about by the motion of theair in a sun-beam, should form of themselvesthe figure of a man, with life and action; asthat the animal spirits, tested either by the

regular