DEDICATION  5-7   005  006  007

NOTICE - BRIDGEWATER SERIES OF TREATISES  9-11   009  010  011

PREFACE  15-20   015  016  017  018  019  020



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 


[043] There is nothing which appears to have been more conclusively established by [recent geological discoveries], than a definite origin or commencement for the present animal and vegetable races. Now we knowwhat it is which upholds the whole of the physiological system that is now before our eyes, -- even the succssive derivation of each individual member from a parent of its own likeness; but we see no force in nature, and no complication of forces, which can tell us what it was that originated the system. It is at this passage in the history of nature, where we meet with such pregnant evidence for the interposition of a designing cause, -- an evidence, it will be seen, of prodigious density and force, when we compute the immense number and variety of those aptitudes, whether of form, or magnitude, or relative position, which enter into the completion of an organic structure.





I. FIRST GENERAL ARGUMENT. -- On the Supremacy ofConscience,  71


II. SECOND GENERAL ARGUMENT. -- On the Inherent Pleasure of the Virtuous, and Misery of the Vicious Affections,  111


III. THIRD GENERAL ARGTJMENT, -- The Power and Operation of Habit,  145

IV. On the General Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral Constitution of Man,  169


V. On the Special and Subordinate Adaptations of External Nature to the Moral Constitution of Man,  197


VI. On those Special Affections which conduce to the Civil and Political Wellbeing of Society,  227-290