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On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God: As Manifested in by Thomas Chalmers

By Thomas Chalmers

The 8 Bridgewater Treatises of the 1830s aimed to give a contribution to an knowing of the realm as created via God. This, the 1st treatise, by means of the Scottish mathematician and churchman Thomas Chalmers, proposes an 'argument for the nature of the Deity, as grounded at the legislation and appearances of nature'. It sees harmonies among the highbrow and fabric worlds as manifesting the hand of God of their production, looking ahead to elements of modern 'intelligent layout' thought. quantity I comprises chapters evaluating virtuous and harsh personalities; the idea that of behavior; how exterior nature is tailored to man's ethical structure; and the way ethical and highbrow features of mankind bring about the civil and political healthiness of society. quantity II offers particular examples of God's layout together with happiness and the relationship among mind, emotion and should, concluding that components left as open questions by way of science's loss of facts are symptoms of divine structure.

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27 power in the laws of our existing natural philosophy to replace them. Or, in other words, if ever a time was, when the structure and dispositions of matter, under the present economy of things were not—there is no force known in nature, and no combination of forces that can account for their commencement. The laws of nature may keep up the working of the machinery —but they, did not and could not set up the machine. The human species, for example, may be upholden, through an indefinite series of ages, by the established law of transmission—but were the species destroyed, there are no observed powers of nature by which it could again be originated.

Yet there remains this distinction between the mental and the corporeal economy of man, that whereas the evidence is more rich and manifold 44 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. in the bodily structure itself, than even in its complex and numerous adaptations to the outer world ;* the like evidence, in our peculiar department, is meagre, as afforded by the subjective mind, when compared with the evidence of its various adjustments and fitnesses to the objective universe around it, whether of man's moral constitution to the state of human society, or of his intellectual to the various objects of physical investigation.

The mind may either be regarded as a congeries of different faculties; or as a simple and indivisible substance, with the susceptibility of passing into different states. By the former mode of viewing it, the memory, and the judgment, and the con- INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 33 science, and the will, are conceived of as so many distinct but co-existent parts of mind, which is thus represented to us somewhat in the light of an organic structure, having separate members, each for the discharge of its own appropriate mental function or exercise.

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