 The central feature of the positive aspect of Shaftesbury’s religion is belief in a perfectly good God based on an argument from design. (At C 2.364–5, he suggests that it is possible to give an a priori argument for the existence of God as well). Proper attention to the magnificent order of natural phenomena, Shaftesbury argues, leads inevitably to the conclusion that the world was created by a perfect being. If we found a perfectly designed piece of architecture on a desert island, we would conclude that a mind had formed it even if we could see no intelligent being in the area. Just so, Shaftesbury argues, we must conclude that a mind has formed the world as a whole, even though such a mind is not present to our senses. Shaftesbury develops this argument most fully in The Moralists, in which Theocles convinces Philocles that perfect theism follows from an understanding of nature as a whole (C 2.284–5, 2.340–393). Everything is “fitted and join’d” together, Theocles contends, each contributing to the “Order, Union, and Coherence of the Whole” (C 2.287). “All we can see either of the Heavens or Earth, demonstrates Order and Perfection” (C 2.291). “All things in this world are united” in a “universal system” (C 2.287). And