Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts - From The Edinburgh Review, October 1849, Volume 90, No. - CLXXXII. (Pages 293-356) by Henry Rogers
page 31 of 94 (32%)
page 31 of 94 (32%)
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dependence and subordination of each of these classes of organised
beings to every other, and to all; of the vegetable to the animal---of the lower animal to the higher. Their magnitudes, numbers, physical force, faculties, functions, duration of life, rates of multiplication and development, sources of subsistence, must all have been determined in exact ratios, and could not transgress certain limits without involving the whole universe in confusion. This amazing sum of probabilities is yet to be further augmented by the fact that all these classes of organised substances are intimately related to those great elements of the material world in which they live, to which they are adapted, and which are adapted to them; that all of them are subject to the influence of certain mighty and subtle agencies which pervade all nature,--and which are of such tremendous potency that any chance error in their proportions of activity would be sufficient to destroy all, and which yet axe exquisitely balanced and inscrutably harmonised. The proofs of design, arising from the relations thus maintained between all the parts, from the most minute to the most vast, of our own world, are still to be further multiplied by the inconceivably momentous relations subsisting between our own and other planets and their common centre; amidst whose sublime and solemn phenomena science has most clearly discovered that everything is accurately adjusted by geometrical precision of force and movement; where the chances of error are infinite, and the proofs of intelligence, therefore, equal. These proofs of design in each fragment of the universe, and in all combined, are continually further multiplied by every fresh discovery, whether in the minute or the vast--by the microscope or the telescope; for every fresh law that is discovered, being in harmony with all that has previously been discovered, not only yields its own proof of design, but infinitely more, by all the relations in which it stands to other laws: it yields, |
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