Anti-theistic Theories: Being the Baird Lecture for 1877

Front Cover
W. Blackwood and sons, 1879 - Atheism - 555 pages

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 160 - 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 iu philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.
Page 384 - Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him ? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth ? saith the Lord.
Page 172 - ... 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...
Page 131 - ... the extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity.
Page 76 - It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For, while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further, but, when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.

Bibliographic information