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Show Page 171 There was not much matter here, but Orson relished being read. Any attention from serious scholars was welcome, and Orson's foray into "materialism" began to draw fire. An Edinborough divine, Mr. T.W.P. Taylder, put out a soporific little pamphlet in reply to Orson's anthropomorphic delusions - The Materialism of the Mormons or Latter-Day Saints, Examined and Sxposed. And, in this age of manifestoes and counter-manifestoes, Orson dutifully rebutted with an essay, perhaps his soundest, Absurdities of Immaterialism, or, A Reply to T.W.P. Taylder's Pamphlet. Taylder's initial argument is with the rationality of "Mormon philosophy." He finds it "irrational" to believe mind or spirit to be material phenomena, for, as he says,"All the qualities of matter are not comparable with the more excellent qualities of mind, such as power and intelligence...Mind thinks, matter cannot think." The body, for Taylder, consists merely of the "medium through which the mind is manifest." In comparing the properties of matter to those of mind, Taylder finds it absurd to speak of "the twentieth part of our belief, the half of a hope, the top of memory, the corner of a fear, the north side of a doubt, &c! Mind then is not matter." He conceives that Orson argues strictly for a mechanistic brain that secretes affections like a gland giving off hormones, that Mormon "materialism" requires emotions to be as measurable as chemical compounds: "If mind be matter, or matter mind, then we may have the square or cube of goy or,grief, of pain or pleasure. We may divide a great joy into a number of little joys, or we may accumulate a great joy by heaping together the solid parts of several little joys. We shall then have the color and shape of a thought. It will be either white, grey, brown, crimson, purple, or it may be amixture of two or more colors. Then we shall have a dark grey hope, a bright yellow sorrow, a round brown tall pain, and an octagonal green belief; an inch of though, a mile of joy." Needless to say, Taylder sees this not relatively, but absolutely absurd, |