Where
there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial
space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect
the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive
thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter, formed
for that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction is an action
of matter, or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator
the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking,
shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called
attraction, which reins the planets in the track of their orbits, or how
an absence of matter can have a will, and by that will put matter into
motion, then the Materialist may be lawfully required to explain the
process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we
quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial
existences, is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels,
God, are immaterial, is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no
God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am
supported in my creed of materialism by the Lockes, the Tracys, and
the Stewarts. At what age* of the Christian church this heresy of
immaterialism, or masked atheism, crept in, I do not exactly know. But a
heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it. He told us, indeed,
that 'God is a spirit,' but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor
said that it is not matter.
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