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Show Page 174 clearly proves the immateriality of the mind or spirit" - an assertion which Orson quite understandably labels "Petitio Principii." But Orson by no means shares the skepticism of materialists about the existence of "unembodied" intelligence, or spirit. He simply declares it to be "material," in the sense that it possesses certain attributes of matter - extension, location, and duration. He asks his readers to "endeavour to conceive of a substance which has no parts." He argues, intriguingly, that "the act of remembering" demonstrates the existence of mind, or spirit, as a substance which locates itself in time, and therefore must occupy a position in space as well, for Orson sees clearly an interdependence between space and time: "Time is an essential ingredient to all motion...in our idea of motion are involved the ideas...of space and time." Therefore, Orson is merely asking Taylder, and those like him, to own up and admit the "absurdity" of this continued insistence on "immateriality" as the true mode of spiritual existence. He reduces the whole controversy to a semantic problem when he refers Taylder to the writings of the "immaterialist" Dr. Joseph Butler, Reverend Bishop of Bristol, whose Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed (1736) supposes the spirit of man to be "a simple, uncompounded, indivisible, little atom of conscious substance, or, in other words an intelligent atom." Orson interprets Taylder to be in agreement with Butler, that "mind is simple not compounded," and suggests that the argument is a terminological one: "Where then, Mr. Taylder, is the absurdity in believing as the 'Saints' do, in the existence of immense numbers of intelligent atoms? It agrees most perfectly with the results of your own theory - the only difference is in the name. You call these indivisible substances immaterial, we call them material. You apply to them the same powers that we do. You believe them to be conscious, intelligent, and thinking atoms as well as we." |