I have at least some faint shadow of experience, which is the utmost that can ever be attained in the present subject.

Reason, in innumerable instances, is observed to arise from the principle of generation, and never to arise from any other principle.
HESIOD, and all the ancient mythologists, were so struck with this analogy, that they universally explained the origin of nature from an animal birth, and copulation.

PLATO too, so far as he is intelligible, seems to have adopted some such notion in his TIMAEUS.
The BRAHMINS assert, that the world arose from an infinite spider, who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels, and annihilates afterwards the whole or any part of it, by absorbing it again, and resolving it into his own essence.

Here is a species of cosmogony, which appears to us ridiculous; because a spider is a little contemptible animal, whose operations we are never likely to take for a model of the whole universe.

But still here is a new species of analogy, even in our globe.