COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



an "adamantine barrier of law " — whatever 

 that may be — between man and the source of 

 all goodness ; and, to crown all it tells us that 

 "conscience is an illusion," and prevents our 

 having any " rule of right action." ^ 



Hard words are as powerless to overthrow as 

 to establish a philosophical theory. In scientific 

 inquiry the ability to weigh evidence goes for 

 much, but facility in declamation goes for little. 

 And to any one who has been brought up amid 

 scientific pursuits, there is but little that is in- 

 structive or edifying in the fervid rhetoric of a 

 writer who, in attacking a disagreeable doctrine, 

 prefers to stigmatize it as disagreeable, rather 



^ Lectures on the Study of History^ pp. 63, 67, 48, 82, 

 85* 87* 59' P^^ abler men than Mr. Smith or Mr. Froude 

 have in like manner allowed their feelings to run away with 

 them w^hen treating of this question. ** Not the picture of a 

 man ; but the representation of an automaton that is what it 

 cannot help being ; a phantom dreaming what it cannot but 

 dream ; an engine performing what it must perform ; an incar- 

 nate reverie ; a weathercock shifting helplessly in the winds 

 of sensibility ; a wretched association-machine, through which 

 ideas pass linked together by laws over which the machine has 

 no control ; anything, in short, except that free and self-sus- 

 tained centre of un derived, and therefore responsible activ- 

 ity, which we call Man ; " — such, says Professor Ferrier, is 

 ** the false representation of man which philosophy invariably 

 and inevitably pictures forth whenever she makes common 

 cause with the natural sciences." Lectures and Philosophical 

 Remains y vol. ii. p. 195. Verily the free-will questicn is a 

 great opener of the flood-gates of rhetoric! 

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