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Updated: May 14, 2025
He first contrived masts and sails for ships, and carved statues so admirably, that they not only looked as if they were alive, but had actually the power of self-motion, and would have escaped from the custody of their possessor, if they had not been chained to the wall. Daedalus contrived for Minos a labyrinth, a wonderful structure, that covered many acres of ground.
The microcosm of the human body is the lesser image of the macrocosm. The courses of the same and the other affect both; they are made of the same elements and therefore in the same proportions. Both are intelligent natures endued with the power of self-motion, and the same equipoise is maintained in both. The animal is a sort of 'world' to the particles of the blood which circulate in it.
From the observation of a process, they abstract a characteristic, as general as possible, as, for instance, from the observation of life the characteristic of motion; then they find that the process has the characteristic in common with still other processes as, for instance, the self-motion of the living has the general characteristic of motion in common with the objective motion of the lifeless; and then they persuade themselves that the process which they try to explain is really explained by having found a quality of this process as comprehensive as possible.
But it can be readily seen that life is also motion, and has therefore this characteristic in common with everything which is moved; but that the specific of that motion called life namely, self-motion in consequence of an impulse renewing itself from within, and, as Fechner shows, self-motion in a rotatory direction of the molecules, precisely the same thing which in distinction from other motions we call life, is not explained, but simply ignored.
It cannot admit that, if education is once levelled downwards, the whole body of men will of themselves gradually raise the level to the higher range; for its creed declares that elevation must come from leadership rather than from self-motion of the mass. It will therefore be opposed to any scheme of studies which relaxes discipline or destroys intellectual solidarity.
First, from REFLECTION on the operations of our own minds, we have the ideas of willing, considering, purposing beforehand, malice, or wishing ill to another; and also of life, or perception, and self-motion.
After the fifth day, the shower of clods and stones ceased on the outside of the premises, and the scene shifted to the interior. Spoons, knives, plates, mustard-pots, rolling-pins, and flat-irons appeared suddenly endued with the power of self-motion, and were whirled from room to room, and rattled down the chimneys in a manner which nobody could account for.
"Self-motion, called life, and inorganic movement of bodies by agencies outside of themselves, are but quantitatively, intensively, or gradually different forms of motion; not in their innermost being different.... Our will changes many kinds of motion into heat, makes cold metal to be red-hot simply by hammering.... Likewise inversely, as the law of the conservation of force must require, a part of the eternal heat of the metal can be now and forever transposed into the living motion of our soul."
But in the case of hearing and sight, or in the power of self-motion, and the power of heat to burn, this relation to self will be regarded as incredible by some, but perhaps not by others.
How can that divine sense of the firmament be preserved in so rapid a motion? And where do the multitude of Gods dwell, if heaven itself is a Deity? But when this philosopher says that God is without a body, he makes him an irrational and insensible being. Besides, how can the world move itself, if it wants a body? Or how, if it is in perpetual self-motion, can it be easy and happy?
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