Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Religion
Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Church of England; Skepticism; Skepticism -- Controversial literature
_creation_, insist upon creation without a creator. The unintelligent
and unconscious universe, on their view, is continually creating itself.
The hypothesis of development, however, is not only unintelligible and
utterly devoid of reality, when criticized in its general principle;
as might be expected, it altogether breaks down when it is tested
in detail. Professor Huxley's protoplasm breaks it down. All the
scientific evidence, as that eminent teacher of science showed at
Liverpool last autumn, is opposed to the idea that protoplasm was
developed out of inorganic matter. The hypothesis of spontaneous
life-generation appears to be exploded. Science, at any rate, on its
own positive principles, has no right whatever to pretend that life has
ever been developed out of what was not living. Here, then, a great
and, so far as science can help us to form a judgment, an altogether
impassable barrier rises to view against any development hypothesis. At
a certain stage in the history of the universe protoplasm, organized
life, made its appearance on the scene, starting up as a perfectly new,
an original, an undeveloped phenomenon. Before, all had been inorganic
and dead; now Life was abroad in the world, destined to increase and
multiply, and replenish the universe. Let those who deny divine and
creative will and government, inform us whence came this life. It was
not developed. Must it not have been created. If not, then whence, I
ask, whence did it spring?
The argument which I have just urged should, as I venture to think, be
conclusive even with those who know, and seek to know, nothing more
of science than the order and method of its phenomenal processes. I
will now bring forward a consideration which will, I hope, be admitted
to have weight by those men of science--it is to be greatly lamented
that there should be so few of these--who have studied the nature and
working of the mind as well as the phenomena of sense. We have seen
that protoplasm--that Life--was not developed out of inorganic matter,
but appears to have been an entirely new and primary fact on the face
of the universe. Life came in and appropriated, put to its own uses,
bound up under its own seal, impregnated with its own specific virtue,
the raw inorganic materials which it found in nature; but the power of
Life itself was altogether new. A fact in some sort analogous to this
confronts us in a higher sphere, in the sphere of living intelligence
itself. I refer to the emergence of personal consciousness among
the world of living creatures. To me it appears that the sense of
personality is an altogether new and original fact, one which cannot
be conceived as developed or developable out of any pre-existing
phenomena or conditions. Whence it comes, or how it arises, I know not.
But it appears to be, in and of itself, the assertion of an essential
separateness between One's Self and all phenomena, all constituents,
all conditions whatever. The sense of an I Myself, of Personality,
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