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Updated: June 23, 2025
The organs, even the most complicated and wonderful, were not intended. They are said to be due to the undirected and unintended operation of physical laws. This is Mr. Wallace's argument. He endeavors to show that it is unworthy of God that He should be supposed to have contrived the mechanism of the orchids, as a mechanist contrives a curious puzzle. We recently heard Prof.
The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value.
Keally is a mechanist, and says he discovered this force by accident. It is curiously like the one in Bulwer's novel, which everyone was possessed of and could destroy anything in a moment. Mrs. A. B is going to take us a drive this afternoon. At present my letters to Newport have only produced an invitation to dine with Mrs. Belmont on Saturday, which we are unable to accept.
In fact, that it should have, or be capable of, any condition of well-being, if it is only a complex of physical and chemical forces, is a problem to wrestle with. The ground we walk on is such a complex, but only the living bodies it supports have conditions of well-being. Professor Henderson concedes very little to the vitalists or the teleologists. He is a thorough mechanist.
On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences, and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe."
So the mechanist, while firmly believing that there is an ascending unity in all natural phenomena, is never silly enough to deny that living things are alive, or that thinking beings think.
"Why, Will," said Ganlesse, "thou art a more complete mechanist than I suspected; thou hast brought thy scene-shifting inventions to Derbyshire in marvellously short time." "A rope and pullies can be easily come by," answered Will; "and with a saw and a plane, I can manage that business in half a day.
But unless Professor Thomson does impute this to the mechanist, we quite fail to see the relevance his assertion that there are three departments, physics, biology, and psychology, each with its characteristic questions, categories, and formulæ. Of course, there are, and equally, of course, physical laws will not cover biological facts; nor will biological laws cover psychological ones.
The novelist shall put what springs and wheels he pleases into his mechanism, but the springs and wheels he places in the mechanist himself, must be those of genuine humanity, or the whole fiction falls to the ground. Now the mechanist, the hero of the story, the "Artist of the Beautiful," is described throughout as animated with the feelings proper to the artist, not to the mechanician.
As a legacy, no doubt, from the Deistic controversies of the preceding century, the general thought did not rise above the notion of a Supreme Mechanist and all-powerful Ruler of all things.
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