Ideas absurd and irreconcileable!
Discoursing upon the hypothesis of "a fortuitous concourse of atoms"
Dr. Priestley asks, "what reason we have to think that small masses of
matter can have power without communication _ab extra_?" Let this
question be returned, "have we not reason to think so from attraction
the most common property in matter." To get rid of this difficulty he
will not allow an atom of matter to be possessed originally of the most
simple powers, though he is ready to allow matter to have been eternal.
A magnet according to this system must sometime have existed without
its magnetic power. He concludes there must be some original existent
Being. He shall be allowed many original existent Beings if it pleases
him. A man may be an originally existent being, as well as any other.
He is superior to other animals in this world. In like manner there may
be allowed superior Beings to man (as most probably there are) and yet
those superior Beings not have made man.
Dr. Priestley will have it, that all bodies are moved by external
force. That does not seem quite necessary. Motion may as well be
asserted to be originally a property of matter, or its true natural
state and rest a deprivation of that property, as that rest should be
its natural state. Hume thought so and Hume was no great fool,
notwithstanding Dr. Priestley makes so light of him. In fact matter
never is, and therefore most probably never was found to be in a state
of rest.
Pages:
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56