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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
There is no doubt but that this is the correct explanation, for chance is not a synonymn for 'lawlessness' in the literature of science. The materialist, however, comes to grief when he maintains that his 'tram-car of matter and force could not only guide itself so precisely as to steer clear of all turns and bends and other obstacles in its path, but could evolve out its passengers as well. For intelligence is not a product of matter, and no amount of weight of authority and glib talking would ever succeed in proving that the conscious could come out of that which is unconscious by nature. The argument put in the mouth of Bishop Butler, in the famous Belfast Address, which the late Prof. Tyndall declared to be unanswerable, has in no way been refuted since :
"Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed. Imagine them separate and sensationless; observe them running together and forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can you see or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mechanical act and from these individually dead atoms, sensation thought, and emotion are to rise? Are you likely to extract Home, out of the rattling of dice, or Differential Calculus out of the clash of billiard-balls? You cannot satisfy the human understanding in its demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness."
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Tyndall tried to evade the difficulty by enlarging the definition of matter to include life. He said :
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"If we look at matter as pictured by Democritus, and as defined for generations in our scientific text-books, the notion of conscious life coming out of it cannot be formed by the mind. The argument placed in the mouth of Bishop Butler suffices, in my opinion, to crush
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