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How did the inconceivability of antipodes prove that experience had given any testimony against their possibility? How did the incapacity men felt of conceiving sunset otherwise than as a motion of the sun, represent any “net result” of experience in support of its being the sun and not the earth that moves?
To me it is not a hypothesis at all; it's simply an inconceivability." "Do you mean that it is self-contradictory?" "No, not exactly that. Simply that it is unimaginable." "Oh!" I said; "but what one can imagine depends on the quality of one's imagination! To me, for example, the immortality of the soul does not seem any harder to imagine than birth and life, and death and consciousness.
These discoveries flatly contradict that confidence, in the form in which it originally presents itself, and all doctrines of immortality which adult philosophy can entertain are more or less subterfuges and after-thoughts by which the observed fact of mortality and the native inconceivability of death are more or less clumsily reconciled.
It will be instructive, however, to those who rely upon Locke's exposition of the argument from Inconceivability to see how effectually he has himself destroyed it. For this purpose, therefore, I shall make some further quotations from the same train of reasoning.
Again, and conversely, the action of mind upon matter (which, we are now told, not only needs no explanation itself, but is the explanation of all other effects), has appeared to some thinkers to be itself the grand inconceivability. It was to get over this very difficulty that the Cartesians invented the system of Occasional Causes. They could not conceive that thoughts in a mind could produce movements in a body, or that bodily movements could produce thoughts. They could see no necessary connexion, no relation
For to assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed against Him is infinite also and therefore demands an eternal punishment, is, apart from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured person but by the intention of the injurer, and that to speak of an infinite culpable intention is sheer nonsense, and nothing else.
To this I answer, first, that it is by no means true that the inconceivability, by us, of the negative of a proposition proves all, or even any, “pre-existing experience” to be in favor of the affirmative. There may have been no such pre-existing experiences, but only a mistaken supposition of experience.
A Scotch daughter, she would bide by her father's word. Unaware of his funeral, Timmins himself stood scratching his poll. "So you'll not give her to me?" he futilely repeated. For the first time the elder looked toward him. "Mon, canna ye see the impossibility o' it? No, ye canna ha' her till till" he cast about for the limit of inconceivability "till ye're an elder i' the Presbyterian Kirk."
Hence, two unthinkables are presented to our choice; one of which is an eternity of matter and of force, and the other an Infinite Mind, so that in this respect again the two theories are tolerably parallel; and therefore, all that can be concluded with rigorous certainty upon the subject is, that neither theory has anything to gain us against the other from an appeal to the test of inconceivability.
The test of absolute inconceivability making equally for and against the doctrine of Theism, disputants are compelled to fall back on the test of relative inconceivability; and as the direction in which the more inconceivable proposition will here seem to lie will be determined by previous habits of thought, it follows that while to a theist metaphysical teleology will appear a probable argument, to an atheist it will appear an improbable one.
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