— The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...?
Where this quote comes from
This comes from the queries Newton placed at the end of Opticks, open questions he posed instead of claims he could prove. In Query 28 he asks how the eye and ear could have been made without knowledge of optics and sound, and how instinct and the will move the body. His answer is a question too: whether nature shows an intelligent being present everywhere in space.
Source: Opticks, Book III, Query 28 (4th ed., 1730)
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More from Isaac Newton
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
— The Correspondence Of Isaac Newton
This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.
— Opticks
Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.
— The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne, did not I think it better to pass it by.
— The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Published for the Royal Society. VOLUMES 1 through 7
Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy