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Show Page 175 Orson thus dismisses Taylder as a quibbler who is in essential agreement with him, but not before he ridicules the divine'for confusing the qualities of mind with mind itself: "Joy is no more a substance than motion. Both are merely the states or conditions of substance." Although Orson uses the term "materialism" in a non-traditional sense, he finds Taylder's notion of "substance" roughly equivalent to "matter." Orson later in the essay does come into substantial agreement at times with philosophical materialism. When he posits that the only "essence" in existence is "solidity," he denies, at least in the accepted sense, the venerable Platonic tradition that the "essence" of a physical object resides in the divine mind - the material world is somehow reductive, a mere reflection of God's eternal conception of the universe. Orson comes close to the ideas of Joseph Priestley, whom he has read and quotes by name, when he announced, "Solidity is not a property of anything - it is the essence itself...Deprive atoms of solidity, and they are deprived... of existence itself, and nothing remains." Priestley, the foremost scientific mind of his age and a thoroughgoing determinist, believed that mind could be understood as the interaction of material substances. Orson attacks this notion as "baseless...Mechanism implies the incapability of a substance to act only as it is acted upon...But not so with an intelligent thinking substance: it can...act according to its own will, independently of the laws of mechanism." This argument proceeds from Orson's fundamental premise that all matter is inherently active, self-moving, and therefore "intelligent in its sphere." Though he believes the universe to be "essentially" material, Orson rejects philosophical materialism as a system because he finds it insufficient to account for the phenomenon of mind. |
