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ized person, such as you seem to suggest. We have even a definition m the 
Thirty-nine Articles quite the reverse. 
Mr. Holyoake.— Excuse me interrupting, but I have had much experience 
in presiding at meetings like these, and I have always found it well to 
allow a speaker to finish in his own way. I was saying that Dr. M‘Cann 
considers this Being, this conscious Person, to be voluntarily conditioned. 
We will consider that hereafter. In the eleventh clause, he says : “ If the 
inspection of a machine necessitates or renders self-evident the affirmation of a 
conscious agent, the inspection of nature, for exactly the same reasons, renders 
the same affirmation necessary in regard to it.” I will admit, for argument s 
sake, that a machine necessarily implies a contriver ; but then every machine 
of which we have any knowledge has been contrived by man, by an organized 
being, and even the greatest intellects we have known have been persons of 
limited capacity and liable to err. You ask me, because I admit that a 
machine implies that it has been made by man, to say that it is logical, and in 
perfect analogy, to conclude, from other things which I see around me, that 
a totally distinct Being or Organism exists. Logic fails you there. If it 
proves anything by this process of analogy, it proves the existence of a Man. 
The only novelty I have found in the paper is one which may place Dr. 
M‘Cann in a difficulty with his spiritual pastors and superiors, if they take 
any notice of it ; it is certainly heresy. He says, the Deity “ could not be 
the author of His own existence : not the Universal, the First Cause. Mr. 
Reddie maintained that the Deity was the First Cause of everything. If, 
according to Dr. M‘Cann, this Deity “could not be the author of His own 
existence, and, consequently, could not be the Universal or First Cause” 
(paragraph 13), he must be the second or lower cause, and, conse- 
quently, by parity of reasoning, He must be the effect of some preceding 
cause. I believe, myself, there is no Being, in the sense of this paper, that could 
possibly have been the First Cause, or even a conscious person, omnipresent 
and unproduced. It is self-evident that the First Cause must be uncaused. 
If any human being can imagine the first cause of everything, it will be a feat 
which I know no one able to perform. What do you mean by a First Cause 
in the sense claimed for the Deity, or for the cause of the universe ? It is an 
unthinkable idea. You cannot imagine something existing before anything 
existed, or imagine a time when time was not. If this Being was not the 
first cause, Nature, or something we call Nature, must have been in existence, 
and this Being, for whom Dr. M‘Cann has been contending, must be some- 
thing within Nature, and therefore not God at all. I say, then, you cannot 
possibly imagine a Being outside governing all things. You cannot get out- 
side of everywhere ; everything within nature is a part of nature, and subject 
to the laws of nature. If you say that God is not an organized Being, and not 
a person in the sense that I understand, how do you make out that there can 
be intelligence without organization ? We never knew intelligence without 
organization, and you have therefore no analogy to go by. That is exactly 
the position, and always must be the position, in considering final causes 
Dr. M‘Cann has quoted Mr. Lewes, who says that “ the search after first and 
