The Insuppressible Book: A Controversy Between Herbert Spencer and Frederic Harrison

Front Cover
S.E. Cassino, 1885 - 278 pages
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 22 - Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the ONE absolute certainty, that he is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.
Page 185 - God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things...
Page 177 - Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device.
Page 183 - Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?
Page 50 - Consequently, the final outcome of that speculation commenced by the primitive man, is that the Power manifested throughout the Universe distinguished as material, is the same Power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness.
Page 17 - Or rather, we may say that transference from the one to the other is accompanied by increase ; since, for an explanation which has a seeming feasibility, science substitutes an explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, there leaves us in presence of the avowedly inexplicable. Under one of its aspects scientific progress is a gradual transfiguration of Nature. Where ordinary perception saw perfect simplicity it reveals great complexity; where there seemed absolute inertness it discloses...
Page 50 - ... this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect to the Universe...
Page 38 - We can wonder at it, as the child wonders at the ' twinkling star,' and that is all. It is a religion only to stare at. Religion is not a thing of star-gazing and staring, but of life and action. And the condition of any such effect on our lives and our hearts is some sort of vital quality in that which is the object of the religion. The mountain, sun, or sky which untutored man worships is thought to have some sort of vital quality, some potency of the kind possessed by organic beings. When mountain,...
Page 18 - Each generation of physicists discovers in so-called brute matter, powers which, but a few years before, the most instructed physicists would have thought incredible ; as instance the ability of a mere iron plate to take up the complicated aerial vibrations produced by articulate speech, which, translated into multitudinous and varied electric pulses, are retranslated a thousand miles off by another iron plate and again heard as articulate speech. When the explorer of Nature sees that, quiescent...
Page 183 - Thus saith the Lord, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the Lord that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself...

Bibliographic information