Life: Its True Genesis by R. W. Wright
page 64 of 256 (25%)
page 64 of 256 (25%)
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Our language, and that of all civilized peoples on the globe, must be thoroughly recast, not only in its philological and etymological character, but in its ideologic, etiologic, and other significations, before we can successfully fall back on an antecedent cause without an effect, or an effect without an antecedent cause. Besides, the human mind would have to undergo as complete a subversion of structure as language itself, before any such attempt at recasting it, on the basis of modern materialistic ideas, could possibly prove successful. And then, at least one-third of our language would have to disappear in this iconoclastic reform. For instance, take any well-tabulated synopsis of our categories and their relations, and they would nearly all have to be recast or entirely abandoned. Time, space, matter, motion, intellect, abstract ideas, volitions, affections, etc., with their several correlates or co-relations, would all have to undergo a thorough recasting process. The personal, intersocial, sympathetic, moral, and religious relations and obligations, would have to be summarily set aside for future revision, if not for sweeping rejection. All our ideas of life, materiality, spirituality, animality, vegetability, sensibility, etc., would have to fall into greater or less desuetude, the language disappearing with the ideas. All the words expressing our ideas of a superhuman agency, of God, angels, heaven, revelation, religious doctrines, sentiments, acts of worship, piety, human accountability to divine institutions, rites, ceremonies, etc.,--to say nothing of maleficent spirits, mythological and other fabulous divinities, entering so largely into the spirit and machinery of all our best poetry--would utterly disappear from our language. All our churches, minsters, chapels, tabernacles, cathedrals, and temples erected to the "living God," embracing the finest and most majestic architecture of the world, would have to succumb to the iconoclastic zeal of these materialistic reformers. The ten categories of |
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