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Thoughts on Religion by George John Romanes
page 9 of 159 (05%)
with, a corresponding grade of cerebral development. There is thus both
a qualitative and a quantitative relation between intelligence and
cerebral organisation. And if it is said that matter and motion cannot
produce consciousness because it is inconceivable that they should, we
have seen at some length that this is no conclusive consideration as
applied to a subject of a confessedly transcendental nature, and that in
the present case it is particularly inconclusive, because, as it is
speculatively certain that the substance of mind must be unknowable, it
seems _à priori_ probable that, whatever is the cause of the unknowable
reality, this cause should be more difficult to render into thought in
that relation than would some other hypothetical substance which is
imagined as more akin to mind. And if it is said that the _more_
conceivable cause is the _more_ probable cause, we have seen that it is
in this case impossible to estimate the validity of the remark. Lastly,
the statement that the cause must contain actually all that its effects
can contain, was seen to be inadmissible in logic and contradicted by
everyday experience; while the argument from the supposed freedom of the
will and the existence of the moral sense was negatived both deductively
by the theory of evolution, and inductively by the doctrine of
utilitarianism.' The theory of the freedom of the will is indeed at this
stage of thought utterly untenable[7]; the evidence is overwhelming that
the moral sense is the result of a purely natural evolution[8], and this
result, arrived at on general grounds, is confirmed with irresistible
force by the account of our human conscience which is supplied by the
theory of utilitarianism, a theory based on the widest and most
unexceptionable of inductions[9]. 'On the whole, then, with regard to
the argument from the existence of the human mind, we were compelled to
decide that it is destitute of any assignable weight, there being
nothing more to lead to the conclusion that our mind has been caused by
another mind, than to the conclusion that it has been caused by anything
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