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that the morality of the N ew Testament is capable of impro vement, and therefore 
I have a right to question the full power of perception of what is beautiful 
and good in the mind of a man who, with all his remarkable intellectual 
gifts, has yet been so purblind to the highest and noblest truths. (Cheers.) 
A Member having made some remarks to the effect that if he understood 
the intent of the paper aright, it was to show that reason directed us to 
religion, and proved to man that there was a God ; if so, he dissented from it. 
The Chairman. — I confess I feel a very strong sympathy for the paper 
before us, and I think my friend on my left, in his zeal against human 
reason, very much resembles the man who was so absorbed in the work of 
sawing off the branch of a tree that he forgot he was sitting upon that very 
branch, and, of course, when it was severed, he fell. If human reason is 
untrustworthy, we have nothing to trust. We have no other light whatever 
to guide us. Dr. Wain wright threw out one remark which he did not carry to 
any conclusion, but on which I should like to hear Mr. Mitchell’s opinion 
— I mean as to unconscious cerebration. No doubt in our own minds we do 
many acts unconsciously. When I am writing I often put a thing away from 
me, as it were, altogether, and yet I afterwards find that my mind has been 
unconsciously acting upon it. That fact is noticed by pantheists as showing 
that there may be an unconscious intellect in nature ; but my answer to 
that is : “ because such a thing is an attribute of the conscious mind, is it 
therefore an attribute of this table ? ” (Laughter.) There is that difficulty 
however, and I think it is one of the pantheistic objections which has the 
most plausibility. I was surprised to hear the way in which Dr. Wain wright 
criticised the passage in which Mr. Mitchell declares that “science is 
thought.” I have yet to learn that the subject and predicate of a sentence 
are convertible things. 
Dr. Wainwright. — Do you mean that science is thought ? 
The Chairman.— No, but not all thought. There is other thought which 
is not science. I deny that the proposition is convertible. 
Dr. Wainwright. — Do you mean that thought is science ? 
The Chairman. — I mean that science is thought — that it is the result of 
thought ; but I entirely deny that thought is science. I understood Dr. 
Wainwright to argue that the proposition was convertible. Then there is 
that passage in the 13th section about the universe forming a conception of 
God. I own that I understood that passage as ironical. 
Mr. Mitchell. — Exactly sd. 
The Chairman. — There has been a great misapprehension on the part of 
some persons as to reason and reasoning. I apprehend Mr. Mitchell uses the 
term “reason” as meaning the whole of the intellectual faculties of the 
human mind, some of which have a foundation in our moral conception, and 
that he includes the intuitive faculties and those things which we cannot 
help believing. I suppose Mr. Mitchell to speak of reason not in any narrow 
sense, but as including the whole intuitive power, the reasoning power, and 
various other powers whereby the mind perceives truth. My belief in an 
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