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CHAP. II - THE LAWS OF NATURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2010

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Summary

These three be the true stages of knowledge, and they are as the three acclamations, Sancte, Sancte, Sancte! holy in the description or dilatation of his works; holy in the connection or concatenation of them; and holy in the union of them in a perpetual and uniform law.

Lord Bacon: Of the Advancement of Learning.

WITH true action we necessarily connect moral conceptions. The ideas cannot be dissociated. And that to which moral conceptions apply is by all termed spiritual. For this reason the fact of nature has been affirmed to be the spiritual world. That it is so, follows from the proposition that inertness does not belong to it. The argument would be the same, if there were insuperable difficulties in conceiving how man should be made to perceive the inert phenomenal world by his presence, in a defective state, in the spiritual world. The proof that it must be so would be none the less complete. But this is by no means the case. On the contrary, the light which the facts of our experience receive from the perception that it is truly a spiritual world with which we are in relation, and that it is physical to us only through man's defectiveness—that its being physical to us denotes, and is evidence of, a dead state of man, which else we should not know—is stronger demonstration than any that rests merely on the intellect. For this evidence embraces all our faculties, and appeals to all our being; revealing the source of our inward strife, and taking away perplexities by demonstrating how they must have arisen.

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Chapter
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Man and his Dwelling Place
An Essay towards the Interpretation of Nature
, pp. 37 - 47
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009
First published in: 1859

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  • THE LAWS OF NATURE
  • James Hinton
  • Book: Man and his Dwelling Place
  • Online publication: 29 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511693052.004
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  • THE LAWS OF NATURE
  • James Hinton
  • Book: Man and his Dwelling Place
  • Online publication: 29 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511693052.004
Available formats
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  • THE LAWS OF NATURE
  • James Hinton
  • Book: Man and his Dwelling Place
  • Online publication: 29 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511693052.004
Available formats
×