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Untitled Article
To assume that Chance or Necessity will account for the production of the material universe , is yet more unsatisfactory . . What is Chance ? What is Necessity ? An active power ? A . substantial existence ? A state or mode of existence ? Or a conception of the human intellect ? If either of the two first , where can we detect their presence ? How shall we trace their operation ? And how did they originate ? If not a substance , how can the existence of eternal substances be modified by them ? Again our doubts are met by words—mere words . Supposing , however , that the globe was formed , surrounded with an atmosphere , and supplied with light and heat , by the concourse of atoms conglomerated by chance , how are we to account for organization and life ? Does sensation depend on the position of particles ? And if it does , has it ever been produced by any other medium than that of animal operation ? Our experience affords as great a certainty as experience can give , that brute matter can be animalized only by animal operation . Whence then arose the first animal ? Mr . Hume , following his Epicurean masters , may tell us that with a finite number of elements , all possible combinations must take place in eternity , and may thus imagine that all arrangements are accounted for ; but something more than arrangement requires explanation . " We have to explain how life , sensation , and intellect , originated . No assemblage of atoms , though they should assume , by chance or necessity , the shape of a man , could form a sentient and intelligent being , any more than a human creature can be produced , when the statuary has chiselled his marble from the block . "—Vol . I . p . 175 .
The hypothesis , advocated by the author of the Systeme de la Nature , that the earth originally possessed a conservative and nutritive power which hatched certain particles into animated beings , may be dispatched with the same repl y . What evidence have we of such a power , and by whom or what was it conferred ? What has become of it , and why does it not still exist ? Mr . Hume ' s " eternal principle of order" deserves no more consideration . A principle is a beginning , a spring , or cause ; so that , according to Mr . Hume , order arose from a cause of order : and this truism , he
declares , solves all difficulties ! This principle of order he supposes to be an internal , unknown cause ; so that it appears all difficulties are not yet solved . ** There is no more difficulty ,, " he says , ' * in conceiving that the several elements , from an internal , unknown cause , may fall into the most exquisite arrangement , than to conceive that their ideas in the great universal mind , from a like unknown cause , fall into that arrangement . " Passing over the gross irreverence of this comparison , it may be asked , what those ideas are ; for Mr . Hume is careful to inform us that he dismisses matter and
mind as nonentities , retaining only impressions and ideas . These must , with the principle which arranges them , consist of some third substance , which , for ought he could tell , might be Deity . The hypothesis of the Princi ple of Order is adopted by Sir W . Drummond , the author of *• Academical Questions . " He , however , asserts the existence of matter , whose primary particles he declares to have been originally precisely similar in all res pects , except as to position ; and that according to their various modes of motion , is the present diversity in the phenomena of nature . How these particles came to be differently placed , is left to conjecture ; as also , how life ori ginated . But we agree with our author that ' * it is time to dismiss these extravagant cosmogonies , which resemble the dreams of a distempered fancy , { part somnia , more than the grave speculations of a rational and phi-
Untitled Article
Crombie ' s Natural Theology . 149
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1830, page 149, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2582/page/5/
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