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Show Page 189 own painstaking evolution. He cites leading philosophical lights to illuminate his own conclusions, but does not hesitate to call them where their personal orthodoxies interfere with their judgment. Herschel he finds close to the discovery of intelligent substance, but too much a slave to the concepts of "inert" matter and an extra-material Creator. The famous philosopher William Whewell, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, comes in for his knocks over the question of "necessary" forces applied to matter; and although Paley gives Orson a tidy clue to the evolution of higher minds, he clearly doesn't go far enough. Newton suffers the most - the formulae of the Principia are not only untenable but backwards, and the inverse square law, though sound in itself, is misapplied. Any attempt to locate Orson Pratt within an established school of philosophy will falter. His premises include not only the activity but also the divinity of primal "intelligent matter"; this in turn seems to be based on the observation that some inner force binds the atom, that "things hold together," and that there is no active force of this nature conceivable that is not somehow a manifestation of intellect. However, Orson's system corresponds quite closely to the philosophical tradition of "panpsychism," which views matter as intrinsically "active" rather than "passive" and, after a fashion, "alive." Orson agrees substantially with the panpsychists, a formidable company in the history of philosophy: Empedocles, many of the Stoics, Francis Bacon, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and in the Twentieth Century, Alfred North whitehead and Monsignor Teilhard, can all be considered "panpsychists" - Bacon, for example, believed in a limited sense that all matter has perception. Panpsychist proofs bear a resemblance to Orson's arguments. They maintain that continuous motion in the universe demonstrates "inner psychic processes," that the idea of |