The Philosophy of Natural Theology: An Essay in confutation of the scepticism of the present dayJackson, William
Religion
The Philosophy of Natural Theology: An Essay in confutation of the scepticism of the present day
Jackson, William
Natural theology; Religion -- Philosophy; Religion and science
Positivism, as is well known, makes many sciences and classifies them
by an ascending scale of Laws. "La Philosophie Positive," writes Littré
(_Paroles_, p. 10) ... "apercevant que, suivant la vraie conception,
où la matière n'est pas séparable de ses propriétés, le mot de
matérialisme n'avait plus d'emploi philosophique qu'en histoire, elle
l'a renouvelé, et s'en est servie pour caractériser l'intrusion de la
méthode de toute science inférieure dans la science supérieure."
If Littré had said, "the intrusion of the _lowest_ into the highest,"
he would have rightly characterized the systems we are describing.
Von Feuchtersleben puts the practical state of the question thus:--"All
we can say is, that an intellectual world reveals itself to us, by the
law of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and that a physical world
manifests itself by those laws which act in space and time. What lies
beyond these laws, as it were the substance of both worlds, we know
not; we only call that of the physical world, matter or body in the
abstract, that of the super-physical, we call spirit (Geist), and must
never forget that hereby we have only pronounced an abstraction.
"But now we ask further, wherein does this higher law manifest itself
to us, as the physical law does in the material world? Nowhere but
in man, and in him only through the medium of his cultivated and
refined reason. What we feel, what we remember, nay, the very inmost
sensations of our individual existence, may be referred to the world
which surrounds us. Thought alone, exalted to the highest degree shows
us another world. We are ourselves therefore not spirit, but we watch,
as it were, what we call by that name, and which manifests itself
to us only by its laws. (Est Deus in nobis.) Man, therefore, should
be the link which connects the two worlds; and this is the problem,
this is the enigma, which can never be solved." He adds in a note:
"Materialism, that is, the view which will not allow the separation
of the intellectual principle from the corporeal, but looks upon the
former as a higher power of the latter, not only explains nothing,
but makes the enigma still more obscure. _Medical Psychology_, Ed.
Sydenham, pp. 15-16.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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