Thoughts on Causality, with References to Phases of Recent Science, a Paper Read Before the Albany Institute, February 2, 1875

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J. Munsell, 1875 - 35 pages
 

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Page 8 - ... like Hume. Mr. Spencer takes another line. With him, as with the uneducated man, there is no doubt or question as to the existence of an external world. But he differs from the uneducated, who think that the world really is what consciousness represents it to be. Our states of consciousness are mere symbols of an outside entity which produces them and determines the order of their succession, but the real nature of which we can never know.
Page 9 - You who have escaped from these religions into the high and dry light of the understanding may deride them ; but in so doing you deride accidents of form merely, and fail to touch the immovable basis of the religious sentiment in the emotional nature of man. To yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem of problems at the present hour.
Page 9 - Can it be possible that man's knowledge is the greatest knowledge— that man's life is the highest life ? My friends, the profession of that Atheism with which I am sometimes so lightly charged would, in my case, be an impossible answer to this question...
Page 9 - In fact the whole process of evolution is the manifestation of a Power absolutely inscrutable to the intellect of man. As little in our day as in the days of Job can man by searching find this Power out. Considered fundamentally, then, it is by the operation of an insoluble mystery that life on earth is evolved, species differentiated, and mind unfolded from their prepotent elements in the immeasurable past.
Page 10 - ... the passage from the current to the needle, if not demonstrable, is thinkable, and that we entertain no doubt as to the final mechanical solution of the problem. But the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of...
Page 10 - ... the corresponding thought or feeling might be inferred ; or, given the thought or feeling, the corresponding state of the brain might be inferred.
Page 10 - I do not think he is entitled to say that his molecular groupings and his molecular motions explain everything. In reality they explain nothing. The utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes of phenomena, of whose real bond of union he is in absolute ignorance.
Page 10 - is stated, as far as that position is a tenable one. I think the materialist will be able finally to maintain this position against all attacks ; but I do not think, in the present condition of the human mind, that he can pass beyond this position. I do not think he is entitled to say that his molecular groupings and his molecular motions explain every thing. In reality, they explain nothing.
Page 9 - For science, however, no exclusive claim is here made; you are not urged to erect it into an idol. The inexorable advance of man's understanding in the path of knowledge, and those unquenchable claims of his moral and emotional nature which the understanding can never satisfy, are here equally set forth.
Page 9 - ... it will be wise to recognize them as • the forms of a force, mischievous, if permitted to intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command, but capable of being guided by liberal thought to noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its proper sphere.

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