An Agnostic's Progress |
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absurd agnostic beefsteak believe body Christ Christian Church conception concerning confusion consciousness criticism deism desirous heart discovered discovery divine doctrine dogma dualism earth Edward Caird efficient cause energy evidence existence experience eyes fact faith guess haunted air human ignorance imagine intellectual Irenæus Karl Pearson knowledge learnt least light limited living look Love machine man's manner matter meaning mechanical metaphysical method mind miracles molecules monism motion mysterious nature ness neutral monist never organic unity Origin of Species pantheism phenomena philosopher physical physiologist plain possessed principle psychology purpose question rational rationalising reality reason recognised religion religious revealed says scheme scholasticism scientific scientific method seems sense Shadowy Companion side Sir Leslie Stephen skeleton soul speak spirit stage theism theologians theological theory things thinker thought true truth universe Uranus whole wonder words worship
Popular passages
Page 53 - Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven : We know her woof, her texture ; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine — Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
Page 85 - Miracle lies in miles of distance, or in pounds avoirdupois of weight ; and not to see that the true inexplicable God-revealing Miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all ; that I have free Force to clutch aught therewith?
Page 102 - For we are born at all adventure: and we shall be hereafter as though we had never been: for the breath in our nostrils is as smoke, and a little spark in the moving of our heart: 3 Which being extinguished, our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit shall vanish as the soft air...
Page 73 - The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable
Page 74 - The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also ; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.
Page 50 - Take the phenomenon of the sleep produced by opium. The Arabs are content to attribute it to the will of God. Moliere's medical student accounts for it by a soporific principle contained in the opium. The modern physiologist knows that he cannot account for it at all. He can simply observe, analyse, and experiment upon the phenomena attending the action of the drug, and classify it with other agents analogous in character
Page 86 - To sum up, the definition of a miracle as a suspension or a contravention of the order of Nature is self-contradictory, because all we know of the order of nature is derived from our observation of the course of events of which the so-called miracle is a part. On the other hand, no conceivable event, however extraordinary, is impossible; and therefore, if by the term miracles we mean only " extremely wonderful events," there can be no just ground for denying the possibility of their occurrence.
Page 56 - Largely, however, if not chiefly, this change of feeling towards religious creeds and their sustaining institutions, has resulted from a deepening conviction that the sphere occupied by them can never become an unfilled sphere, but that there must continue to arise afresh the great questions concerning ourselves and surrounding things; and that if not positive answers, then modes of consciousness standing in place of positive answers, must ever remain.
Page 25 - If these positions are well based, it follows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism ; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata...
Page 72 - I cannot but think," he says, "that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science...