The philosopher David Hume (1711– 76) is perhaps best known today for his skepticism about religion. Yet he was equally skeptical about the mechanistic philosophy of nature. There was nothing in the universe to prove that it was more like a machine than an organism; the organization we see in nature was more analogous to plants and animals than to machines. Hume was against the idea of a machine-designing God, and suggested instead that the world could have originated from something like a seed or an egg. In Hume’s words, published posthumously in 1779, “There are other parts of the universe (besides the machines of human invention) which bear still a greater resemblance to the fabric of the world, and which, therefore, afford a better conjecture concerning the universal origin of the system. These parts are animals and plants. The world plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable, than…