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An Essay on the Principle of Population by T. R. (Thomas Robert) Malthus
page 172 of 192 (89%)
inconsistent with those ideas which we wish to cherish of the
Supreme Being. I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted
before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process
of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of
mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into
spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit
an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the
subject, the various impressions and excitements which man
receives through life may be considered as the forming hand of
his Creator, acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish
existence, by the animating touches of the Divinity, into a
capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the
torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be
said to be born.

It could answer no good purpose to enter into the question
whether mind be a distinct substance from matter, or only a finer
form of it. The question is, perhaps, after all, a question
merely of words. Mind is as essentially mind, whether formed from
matter or any other substance. We know from experience that soul
and body are most intimately united, and every appearance seems
to indicate that they grow from infancy together. It would be a
supposition attended with very little probability to believe that
a complete and full formed spirit existed in every infant, but
that it was clogged and impeded in its operations during the
first twenty years of life by the weakness, or hebetude, of the
organs in which it was enclosed. As we shall all be disposed to
agree that God is the creator of mind as well as of body, and as
they both seem to be forming and unfolding themselves at the same
time, it cannot appear inconsistent either with reason or
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