Somatopsychonoologia: showing that the proofs of body, life and mind ... cannot be deduced from physiology ... being an examination of the controversy concerning life carried on by Laurence [sic], Abernethy, Rennell, and others / By Philostratus [i.e. T.I.M. Forster].

  • Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster
Date:
[1824]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Somatopsychonoologia: showing that the proofs of body, life and mind ... cannot be deduced from physiology ... being an examination of the controversy concerning life carried on by Laurence [sic], Abernethy, Rennell, and others / By Philostratus [i.e. T.I.M. Forster]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ' / 33] the Controversy concerning Life. 511 structure no where implies the necessity of obeying the impulses of any particular organ, as all are under the control of the will, the consentaneousness between which, and the powers which effect its purposes, form admittedly an exceeding curious subject of specu¬ lation.1 There is a question, however, respecting the will, quite unconnected with the seat of any common centre from which it may be supposed to emanate, that is of vital importance to religion ; namely, whether the motives which direct our voluntary decisions, act by necessary and irresistible agency. If man had not freedom of choice, one can hardly conceive him responsible for his actions ; at the same time, all laws, human and divine, seem to presuppose that the ruled are to be influenced by a preponderance of motives. The nature of moral motives has employed in vain the metaphysi¬ cal pen of so many able writers, that I shall not reiterate the course they have gone, nor attempt to explain it; but believing that this, like all other questions in which Mind is concerned, is not solvable by philosophy, I shall refer it to the decision of the Catholic Church. It may not be amiss, however, in this place to advert to some of the errors into which similar considerations have led dif¬ ferent persons, in order to show more completely the futility and bad tendency of such inquiries. Some philosophers have gone the length of saying, that every event coming from a necessary cause or causes from the beginning, we must refer the whole of the evil, as well as the good in the world, either to the will of the Creator, or else to some mechanical source of causation. This sort of doctrine is called philosophical necessity ; it seems, at one time, to have been the opinion of Priestley, of Hume, and of many other writers. A particular application of this doctrine to the re¬ ligious conduct of human beings, determining their final doom, is called Predestination, and was one of the leading principles of the blasphemer Calvin, of Geneva. Fatalism is a supposed operation of this principle on a still more limited scale; it supposes those actions of a man’s life which lead to great public events, and finally to his death, to be so under the particular direction of some overruling power, that, do what he will, he cannot avoid the ultimate calamity that is doomed to await him ; while in regard to indifferent actions, he is left free. Persons who retain these ideas, are frequently men of great talent, though they are not deep philosophers, or they would see the prodigious difficulty of splitting the question of Necessity, and leaving certain actions free while others are ruled by fatality. Many warriors have been led into this error from constantly viewing the uncertain events of their precarious life, and the