A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and EssaysBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and Essays
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought
The argument in favor of the corollary to the second proposition is
that the parts of infinity of extension are necessarily immovable among
themselves; but if there be no such thing as infinity of extension--that
is, if extension be only a quality and not necessarily infinite; if
infinite mean only indefiniteness or illimitability, and if infinity can
not have parts--this argument goes for very little. The acceptance of
the argument that the parts of infinity of extension are immovable
is rendered difficult when the reader considers Mr. Gillespie's
sub-proposition (4) that the parts of the material universe are movable
and divisible from each other. He urges that a part of the infinity of
extension or of its substratum must penetrate the material universe and
every atom of it. But if infinity can have no parts, no part of it
can penetrate the material universe. If infinity have parts (which is
absurd), and if some part penetrate every atom of the material universe,
and if the part so penetrating be immovable, how can the material
universe be considered as movable, and yet as penetrated in every atom
by immovability? If penetrated be a proper phrase, then, at the moment
when the part of infinity was penetrating the material universe,
the part of infinity so penetrating must have been in motion. Mr.
Gillespie's logic is faulty. Use his own language, and there is either
no penetration, or there is no immovability.
In his argument for the fourth proposition, Mr. Gillespie--having by his
previous proposition demonstrated (?) what he calls a substratum for the
before demonstrated (?) infinity of extension--says, "it is intuitively
evident that the substratum of infinity of extension can be no more
divisible than infinity of extension." Is this so? Might not a complex
and divisible substratum be conceived by us as possible to underlie a
(to us) simple and indivisible indefinite extension, if the conception
of the latter were possible to us? There can not be any intuition. It
is mere assumption, as, indeed, is the assumption of extension at
all, other than as the extension of substance. In his argument for
proposition 5, Gillespie says that "any one who asserts that he can
suppose two or more necessarily existing beings, each of infinity of
expansion, is no more to be argued with than one who denies, Whatever
is, is." Why is it more difficult to suppose this than to suppose
one being of infinity, and, in addition to this infinity, a material
universe? Is it impossible to suppose a necessary being of heat, one
of light, and one of electricity, all occupying the same indefinite
expansion? If it be replied that you can not conceive two distinct and
different beings occupying the same point at the same moment, then it
must be equally impossible to conceive the material universe and God
existing together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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