Seventh objection. (Sect. 51.) To refer all change to spiritual agents alone, and to regard the things of sense as wholly impotent, thus discharging natural causes as the New Principles do, is at variance with human language and with good sense.
Answer. While we may speak as the multitude do, we should learn to think with the few who reflect. We may still speak of “natural causes,” even when, as philosophers, we recognise that all true efficiency must be spiritual, and that the material world is only a system of sensible symbols, [pg 230] regulated by Divine Will and revealing Omnipresent Mind.
Eighth objection. (Sect. 54, 55.) The natural belief of men seems inconsistent with the world being mind-dependent.
Answer. Not so when we consider that men seldom comprehend the deep meaning of their practical assumptions; and when we recollect the prejudices, once dignified as good sense, which have successively surrendered to philosophy.
Ninth objection. (Sect. 56, 57.) Any Principle that is inconsistent with our common faith in the existence of the material world must be rejected.
Answer. The fact that we are conscious of not being ourselves the cause of changes perpetually going on in our sense-ideas, some of which we gradually learn by experience to foresee, sufficiently accounts for the common belief in the independence of those ideas, and is what men truly mean by this.
Tenth objection. (Sect. 58, 59.) The foregoing Principles concerning Matter and Spirit are inconsistent with the laws of motion, and with other truths in mathematics and natural philosophy.
Answer. The laws of motion, and those other truths, may be all conceived and expressed in consistency with the absence of independent substance and causation in Matter.
Eleventh objection. (Sect. 60-66.) If, according to the foregoing Principles, the material world is merely phenomena presented by a Power not-ourselves to our senses, the elaborate contrivances which we find in Nature are useless; for we might have had all experiences that are needful without them, by the direct agency of God.
Answer. Elaborate contrivances in Nature are relatively necessary as signs: they express to us the occasional presence and some of the experience of other men, also the constant presence and power of the Universal Spirit, while [pg 231] the scientific interpretation of elaborately constituted Nature is a beneficial moral and intellectual exercise.