Reconciliation of Science and Religion

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Harper, 1877 - 403 pages
 

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Page 125 - That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.
Page 403 - SKETCHES OF CREATION. Sketches of Creation: a Popular View of some of the Grand Conclusions of the Sciences in reference to the History of Matter and of Life. Together with a Statement of the Intimations of Science respecting the Primordial Condition and the Ultimate Destiny of the Earth and the Solar System. By ALEXANDER WINCHELL, LL.D., Professor of Geology, Zoology, and Botany in the University of Michigan, and Director of the State Geological Survey.
Page 136 - I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter, which we in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life.
Page 238 - In affirming that the growth of the body is mechanical, and that thought, as exercised by us, has its correlative in the physics of the brain, I think the position of the " Materialist " 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, as the human mind is at present constituted, that he can pass beyond it.
Page 230 - I know how the corn sprouts? Yesterday there was not a blade in my field ; to-day I returned to the field and found some. Who can have given to the earth the wisdom and the power to produce it ? " " Then I buried my face in both my hands.
Page 361 - And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
Page 110 - The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement of which all the phenomena of the universe...
Page 237 - ... 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 110 - And no doubt it is quite true that the doctrine of Evolution is the most formidable opponent of all the commoner and coarser forms of Teleology. But perhaps the most remarkable service to the philosophy of Biology rendered by Mr. Darwin is the reconciliation of Teleology and Morphology, and the explanation of the facts of both which his views offer.
Page 278 - ... (what, however, it can never do), all laws in a single formula, and consummate all conditional knowledge in the unity of unconditional existence. Nor is it only in science that the mind desiderates the one. We seek it equally in works of art.

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