[Painted Windows by Harold Begbie]@TWC D-Link bookPainted Windows CHAPTER X 12/34
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It appears from the investigation of science, from investigation of the method of scientific procedure itself, that there must be a Will in which the whole world is rooted and grounded; and that we and all other things proceed therefrom; because only so is there even a hope of attaining the intellectual satisfaction for which science is a quest. Reason is obliged to confess the hypothesis of a Creative Will, although it does not admit that man has in any way perceived it.
But is this hypothesis, which is essential to science, to be left in the position of Mahomet's coffin? Is it not to be investigated? For if atheism is irrational, agnosticism is not scientific--"it is precisely a refusal to apply the scientific method itself beyond a certain point, and that a point at which there is no reason in heaven or earth to stop." To speak about an immanent purpose is very good sense; but to speak about a purpose behind which there is no Will is nonsense. People, he says, become so much occupied with the consideration of what they know that they entirely forget "the perfectly astounding fact that they know it." Also they overlook or slur the tremendous fact of spiritual individuality; "because I am I, I am not anybody else." But let the individual address to himself the question he puts to the universe, let him investigate his own pressing sense of spiritual individuality, just as he investigates any other natural phenomenon, and he will find himself applying that principle of Purpose, and thinking of himself in relation to the Creator's Will. If there is Purpose in the universe there is Will; you cannot have Purpose or intelligent direction, without Will.
But, as we have seen, "to speak about an immanent will is nonsense": It is the purpose, the meaning and thought of God, that is immanent not God Himself.
He is not limited to the world that He has made; He is beyond it, the source and ground of it all, but not it.
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