The Uncaused Being and the Criterion of Truth: To which is Appended an Examination of the Views of Sir Oliver Lodge Concerning the Ether of Space

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Sherman, French, 1911 - 110 pages
 

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Page 11 - Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion ; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity ; and during •which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
Page 25 - Who bid brute matter's restive lump assume Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly ? Has matter innate motion ? then each atom, Asserting its indisputable right To dance, would form an universe of dust...
Page 28 - Only thoroughgoing monists or pantheists believe in the absolute. The God of our popular Christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system. He and we stand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints and the angels stand outside of both of us.
Page 25 - Who think a clod inferior to a man! If art, to form; and counsel, to conduct — And that with greater far than human skill, Resides not in each block; — a GODHEAD reigns.
Page 45 - ... augment the conception, although a possible perception has been added to the experience of the mind. But if we cogitate existence by the pure category alone, it is not to be wondered at, that we should find ourselves unable to present any criterion sufficient to distinguish it from mere possibility. Whatever be the content of our conception of an object, it is necessary to go beyond it, if we wish to predicate existence of the object. In the case of sensuous objects, this is attained by their...
Page 29 - God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally treated as a paradox: God, it was said, could not be finite. I believe that the only God worthy of the name must be finite, and I shall return to this point in a later lecture. If the absolute exist in addition — and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrational features, still be left open — then the absolute is only the wider cosmic whole of which our God is but the most ideal portion, and which in the more usual human sense is...
Page 13 - ... understand it, the act of evolving, though it implies increase of a concrete aggregate, and in so far an expansion of it, implies that its component matter has passed from a more diffused to a more concentrated state—has contracted. The antithetical word Involution...
Page 11 - Evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations...
Page 10 - When I wrote the preceding treatise [the Candid Examination], I did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of human nature, as distinguished from physical nature, in any enquiry touching Theism. But since then I have seriously studied anthropology (including the science of comparative religions), psychology and metaphysics, with the result of clearly seeing that human nature is the most important part of nature as a whole whereby to investigate the theory of Theism. This I ought to have...

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