Eighth system.

The WORLD-MACHINE: Worship of the Demi-Ourgos, or Grand Artificer.
"Hitherto the theologians, employing themselves in examining the fine and subtile substances of ether or the generating fire, had not, however, ceased to treat of beings palpable and perceptible to the senses; and theology continued to be the theory of physical powers, placed sometimes exclusively in the stars, and sometimes disseminated through the universe; but at this period, certain superficial minds, losing the chain of ideas which had directed them in their profound studies, or ignorant of the facts on which they were founded, distorted all the conclusions that flowed from them by the introduction of a strange and novel chimera.

They pretended that this universe, these heavens, these stars, this sun, differed in no respect from an ordinary machine; and applying to this first hypothesis a comparison drawn from the works of art, they raised an edifice of the most whimsical sophisms.
A machine, said they, does not make itself; it has had an anterior workman; its very existence proves it.

The world is a machine; therefore it had an artificer.* * All the arguments of the spiritualists are founded on this.

See Macrobius, at the end of the second book, and Plato, with the comments of Marcilius Ficinus.
"Here, then, is the Demi-Ourgos or grand artificer, constituted God autocratical and supreme.