“Under the flowing robes of nature, where all looks arbitrary and accidental, there is an artificiality of the most rigid kind. The natural, we now perceive, sinks into and merges in a Higher Artificial. …we conclude, when we attain a knowledge of the artificiality which is at the basis of nature, that nature is wholly the production of a Being resembling, but infinitely greater than ourselves.”
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 250
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Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) 100
Scottish publisher and writer 1802–1871Related quotes

“You need the natural life; I, the artificial.”
À vous il faut la vie naturelle, à moi la vie factice.
Degas, quoted by George Moore, Impressions and Opinions (1891)
These words were spoken, Moore states, to 'a landscape painter'
1876 - 1895

“Contentment is natural wealth; luxury, artificial poverty.”
As reported by Charles Simmons in A Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker, containing over a thousand subjects alphabetically and systematically arranged (North Wrentham, Mass. 1852), p. 103 http://books.google.de/books?id=YOAyAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA103&dq=socrates. However, the original source of this statement is unknown.
Cf. Joseph Addison in The Spectator No. 574 Friday, July 30, 1714, p. 655 http://books.google.de/books?id=K1cdAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA655&dq=socrates: In short, content is equivalent to wealth, and luxury to poverty; or, to give the thought a more agreeable turn, "content is natural wealth," says Socrates: to which I shall add, "luxury is artificial poverty.".
Attributed
Page 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=pQARAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA3.
Music: An Art and a Language (1920), Preliminary Considerations (Ch. I)

“But do these people never come up with the idea that I might be artificial by nature?”
"Mais est-ce qu'il ne vient jamais à l'idée de ces gens-là que je peux être 'artificiel' par nature?"
Answering M. D. Calvocoressi on a question insinuating that many people thought Ravel's music rather "artificial" than "natural".
quoted in Calvocoressi's Musicians gallery, London, Faber, 1933

volume I; lecture 22, "Algebra"; section 22-1, "Addition and multiplication"; p. 22-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. II: From the Artificial to the Natural