For whether it be due to my intelligence not being
sufficiently advanced to meet the requirements of the age, or whether it be
due to the memory of those sacred associations which to me at least were
the sweetest that life has given, I cannot but feel that for me, and for
others who think as I do, there is a dreadful truth in those words of
Hamilton,--Philosophy having become a meditation, not merely of death, but
of annihilation, the precept _know thyself_ has become transformed into the
terrific oracle to Oedipus--
"Mayest thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art."
* * * * *
APPENDIX
AND
SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAYS.
* * * * *
APPENDIX.
* * * * *
A CRITICAL EXPOSITION OF A FALLACY IN LOCKE'S USE OF THE ARGUMENT AGAINST
THE POSSIBILITY OF MATTER THINKING ON GROUNDS OF ITS BEING INCONCEIVABLE
THAT IT SHOULD.
Lest it should be thought that I am doing injustice to the views of this
illustrious theist, I here quote his own words:--"We have the ideas of
matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether any
mere material being thinks or no, it being impossible for us, by the
contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether
omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter fitly disposed a power
to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter so disposed a
thinking immaterial substance; it being, in respect of our notions, not
much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can, if He
pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that He should
superadd to it another substance with a faculty of thinking; since we know
not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substance the Almighty
has been pleased to give that power, which cannot be in any created being,
but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the Creator.
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