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As long as we speak of matter, if we cannot develope all its properties, we shall at least have fixed, determinate ideas; something tangible, of which we have a slight knowledge, that we can submit to the examination of our senses: but from the moment we begin to talk of immateriality, of incorporeity, from thence our ideas become confused; we are lost in a labyrinth of conjecture we have no one means of seizing the subject on any side we are, after the most elaborate arguments, after the most subtle reasoning, obliged to acknowledge we cannot form the most slender opinion respecting it, that has any thing substantive for its support.
This is easily said; but what if Milton could not seduce his readers to drop immateriality from their thoughts? What if the contrary opinion had taken so full a possession of the minds of men as to leave no room even for the half-belief which poetry requires? Such we suspect to have been the case. It was impossible for the poet to adopt altogether the material or the immaterial system.
Aphthartodocetism springs from a spurious spirituality, from a fastidiousness that has no place in true religion. It is symptomatic of Manicheanism, which associates matter with sin. Christians affirm sinlessness of Christ's humanity; they do not affirm immateriality of His body. The monophysites, in abandoning the true Christology, were predisposed to the infection of this heresy.
In his handling, he presents his spiritual existences with just so much relief as to endow them with life and personality, and not with, that visual distinctness which would at once reveal their spectral immateriality, and so give a shock to the illusion. We might almost say of his personages that they are shapes, "if shape it might be called, that shape had none."
Johnson, who wished for consistency, would have had it preserved "by keeping immateriality out of sight." And a general arraignment has been laid against Milton of a vagueness and looseness of imagery, which contrasts unfavourably with the vivid and precise detail of other poets, of Homer or of Dante, for example.
Mitchell on reading 'Baxter on the Immateriality of the Soul." But at length he settled down in the fixed belief of Materialism, as he had always held the principle of unisubstancisme.
Most of us have felt its fascination second only to that of the dotted spiral of the skipping-stone, a fascination not outgrown with years. There is something singularly attractive in the subtle force that for a moment sways each particle only to pass on to the next, a motion mysterious in its immateriality.
But when I saw everyone at this refreshing meal with a good, thick, substantial bannock, and then looked at the immateriality of my own, I could not help reverting to the woman who made them for me, with a degree of vivacity not altogether in unison with the charity of a Christian.
He is not a Materialist; he admits a real distinction, as well as a close union, between the soul and the body; he speaks even of the possible existence of disembodied souls or pure spirits; he affirms the immateriality of the thinking principle; and expressly assigns his reasons for not being a Materialist.
But, for that matter, the experiments that had established the mechanical equivalent of heat hardly left room for doubt as to the immateriality of this "imponderable." Out of these studies, just at the middle of the century, to which the experiments of Mayer and Joule had led, grew the new science of thermo-dynamics.
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