William Paley Quotes on Nature
William Paley was an English Anglican clergyman, philosopher of religion, and moral philosopher and for half a century one of the most read writers in British religious thought. This page collects quotes attributed to William Paley on the topic of nature, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to William Paley:
“Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground; the inference is irresistible that it had a maker.”
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Attributed to William Paley:
“Contrivance proves design, and design proves a designer.”
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“The infidelity of the Gentile world, and that more especially of men of rank and learning in it, is resolved into a principle which, in my judgment, will account for the inefficacy of any argument, or any evidence whatever, viz . contempt prior to examination.”
A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794). | Variant: There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination. As quoted or paraphrased in Anglo-Israel or, The British Nation: The Lost Tribes of Israel (1879) by Rev. William H. Poole. A simil -
“The great revolution which has taken place in the Western World may probably conduce (and who knows but that it was designed?) to accelerate the fall of this abominable tyranny; and now that this contest, and the passions which attend it are no more, there may succeed perhaps a season for reflecting whether a legislature which had so long lent its assistance to the support of an institution replete with human misery, was fit to be trusted with an empire the most extensive that ever obtained in any age or quarter of the world.”
Vol. I, Book III, Ch. II - Slavery -
“Government, at first, was either patriarchal or military; that of a parent over his family, or of a commander over his fellow warriors. ... Paternal authority, and the order of domestic life, supplied the foundation of civil government . ... A family contains the rudiments of an empire. The authority of one over many, and the disposition to govern and be governed, are in this way incidental to the very nature, and coeval, no doubt, with the existence of the human species.”
Vol. II, Book VI, Ch. I.