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
asserts an antithesis between the Man, and all that the Man uses, takes
up into his personality, makes his own. As Life binds up inorganic
matter under its seal, but is not developed out of inorganic matter, so
the voluntary and responsible Self binds up under the seal of its own
personality all that belongs to the manifold life of its complex being.
As life brings into the universe a new world of phenomena, higher and
more manifold than those of mere inorganic matter, yet embodying and
adopting these, so personality brings into the universe a new world
of vastly higher and rarer phenomena than those of mere vitality,
yet embodies and adopts these:--it introduces all that belongs to
reflection and morality, giving birth to an intelligence and a world
of thought, in which all the lower and anterior phenomena of the world
become matters of cognisance, and are mirrored as objects of thought.
As I venture to think that this sense of personality, with the new
world of reflective consciousness and morality which it brings in, is a
fact, starting up in the midst of a universe of anterior developments,
such as all Mr. Darwin's solvents utterly fail to touch, a phenomenon
which remains as far from explanation as before he wrote his last book,
so it appears to me that the power of human speech is another fact
starting up in the midst of the line of supposed developments which
no hypothesis of evolution can afford any help towards explaining.
Miraculously developed reason, something higher, as it seems to me,
than any development of human reason our race has, in its highest
culture, as yet put forth, must have been necessary in order to the
invention of language by any race even of the most sagacious mammals.
And yet, again, speech itself is a necessity, a necessary instrument,
in order to the high development of reason. We have some idea what
deaf mutes of our human family are like, when no painstaking and
kindly culture has been bestowed on their intelligence, and temper,
and affections, and conscience. Let us conceive the whole race of
man to be, and to have been from the beginning, not indeed deaf, but
congenitally and irreversibly dumb, with no more power of articulate
expression than a horse, or let us say, a dog. What would the
development of human reason have been under such conditions? How, then,
is it possible to conceive that the wondrous faculty and instrument
of speech was ever invented and perfected by mammals of infra-human
faculty and development, and that they were afterwards through this
invention developed yet more highly, until they attained to the dignity
and advancement of humanity? Such infra-human mammals must have been
more miraculously endowed in order to such an invention than ever man
himself has been.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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