1095: John Stuart Mill
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/04/21
“Three Essays on Religion”:
“It’s not too much to say that every indication of Design in the Kosmos is evidence against the Omnipotence of the Designer. For what is meant by Design? Contrivance: the adaptation of means to an end. But the necessity for contrivance — the need of employing means — is a consequence of the limitation of power. Who would have recourse to means if to attain his end his mere word was sufficient? The very idea of means implies that the means have an efficacy which the direct action of the being who employs them has not. … Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, so there is no place for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist.”
“A System of Logic”:
“To define, is to select from among all the properties of a thing, those which shall be understood to be designated and declared by its name; and the properties must be well known to us before we can be competent to determine which of them are fittest to be chosen for this purpose.”
“Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy”:
“The conception of such a being, I will not say of such a God, is worse than a ‘fasciculus of negations;’ it is a fasciculus of contradictions: and our author might have spared himself the trouble of proving a thing to be unknowable, which cannot be spoken of but in words implying the impossibility of its existence. To insist on such a truism is not superfluous, for there have been philosophers who saw that this must be the meaning of ‘The Absolute,’ and yet accepted it as a reality. ‘What kind of an Absolute Being is that,’ asked Hegel, ‘which does not contain in itself all that is actual, even evil included?’ Undoubtedly: and it is therefore necessary to admit, either that there is no Absolute Being, or that the law, that contradictory propositions cannot both be true, does not apply to the Absolute. Hegel chose the latter side of the alternative; and by this, among other things, has fairly earned the honor, which will probably be awarded to him by posterity, of having logically extinguished transcendental metaphysics by a reductio ad absurdum.”
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