Hume : with helps to the study of Berkeley : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hume : with helps to the study of Berkeley : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    nature^ are expressible in terms of matter and motion. Would that the rest of the phenomena of nature could be deduced by a like kind of reason- ing from mechanical principles. For many cir- cumstances lead me to suspect that all these phenomena may depend upon certain forces, in virtue of which the particles of bodies, by causes not yet known, are either mutually impelled against one another and cohere into regular figures, or repel and recede from one another; which forces being unknown, philosophers have as yet explored nature in vain. But I hope that, either by this method of philosophizing, or by some other and better, the principles here laid down may throw some light upon the matter.” ^ ^ So far as Descartes is concerned the jjhenomena of conscious- ness are excluded from this category. According to his view, animals and man, in so far as he resembles them, are mechanisms. The soul, which alone feels and thinks, is extra-natural—a some- thing divinely created and added to the anthropoid mechanism. He thus provided their favourite resting-place for the supra- naturalistic evolutionists of our day. Descartes’ denial of sensation to the lower animals is a neces- sary consequence of his hypothesis concerning the nature and origin of the soul. He was too logical a thinker not to be aware that, if he admitted even the most elementary form of consciousness to be a product or a necessary concomitant, of material mechanism, the assumption of the existence of a thinking substance, apart from matter, would become super- fluous.—[1894]. 2 “ Utinam catera natune phaenomena ex principiis mechani- cis, eodem argumentandi genere, derivare licet Nam multa me movent, ut nonnihil suspicer ea omnia ex viribus quibusdam pendere posse, quibus corporum particulse, per cau.sas nondum cognitas, vel in se mutuo impelluntur et secundum figuras