“Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.”
                                        
                                        1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794) 
Context: It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human. Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.