Selected quad for the lemma: religion_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
religion_n	christian_a	miracle_n	true_a	3,451	5	6.0239	4	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A28958	A discourse of things above reason· Inquiring whether a philosopher should admit there are any such. By a Fellow of the Royal Society· To which are annexed by the publisher (for the affinity of the subjects) some advices about judging of things said to transcend reason. Written by a Fellow of the same Society.	Boyle, Robert, 1627-1691.; Fellow of the same Society. aut	1681 (1681)	Wing B3945; ESTC R214128	62,180	202

belong to Him we may by the same light of Reason that dictated Essence Existence to be two separable things in all other Beings discern that they must be inseparable in God and consequently that the forementioned Rule tho more general than almost any other is not absolutely universal but must be limited by the light of Reason And thus also Philosophers considering that not only all sorts of Bodies but the immaterial Souls of Men and Angels themselves supposing such Beings are all endowed with Qualities which are Accidents have included it in the very notion of a substance to be the subject of Accidents or as the Schoolmen speak substare Accidentibus and accordingly substantia is wont to be derived à substando But the infranchised Intellect finding in it self a notion of an absolutely perfect and therefore existent Being and considering that to be the subject of Accidents is not a thing agreeable to the highest perfection possible it concludes that in God there are no Accidents And this Conclusion has been embraced as a part not only of Christian but of Natural Theology and maintain'd by divers Philosophers themselves upon Metaphysical and other meerly rational grounds In short the native light of the mind may enable a man that will make a free and industrious use of it both to pass a right judgment of the extent of those very Dictates that are commonly taken for Rules of Reason and to frame others on purpose for priviledg'd things so far forth as they are so But I fear Gentlemen the fourth Advice I have ventured to offer you has by its tediousness made you justly impatient of being detain'd by it so long and therefore I shall advanced to the Fifth which imports The Fifth Advice or Rule That where Privileg'd Things are concern'd we are not always bound to reject every thing as false that we know not how to reconcile with some thing that is true Pyrocl. You may call this an Advice but I doubt others will style it a Paradox and possibly think it one of the greatest that ever was broach'd Arnob. Yet perhaps you will find by and by that it may be in great part made good by what has been already discoursed and by you admitted I think it will not be doubted but that there are or may be conceived streight Lines whereof one is a hundred or a thousand times longer than another 'T is also generally granted that a longer Line consists of or may afford more parts than a shorter for a Line equal to the shorter being taken out of the longer and consequently just as divisible as it there will remain of the longer Line another Line perhaps many times exceeding the shorter Line And lastly 't is generally acknowledged that no Number can be greater than infinite since if the lesser number were capable of accession as it must be if it fall short of another number it would need that accession or a greater to make it infinite which yet 't is supposed to be already Pyrocl. I see not yet to what all this may tend Arnob. You will quickly perceive it when I shall have desired you to reconcile these Propositions with the demonstrations of Geometers of the endless Divisibility of all streight Lines whence they deduce that tho they be very unequal among themselves yet the shortest of them contains or may afford infinite parts Pyrocl. But is there any thing more clear to humane understanding or more supposed in almost all our Ratiocinations than that two Truths cannot be contradictory to each other Arnob. Tho I am far from affirming that one Truth can really contradict another truth yet I think that which is but a gradual or limited truth may in some few cases not be reconcileable by Us to an absolute and universal Truth For I think we may with Sophronius distinguish those Propositions we call true into Axioms Metaphysical or Universal that hold in all Cases without reservation and Axioms collected or emergent by which I mean such as result from comparing together many particulars that agree in something that is common to them all And some of these tho they be so general that in the usual Subjects of our Ratiocinations they admit of no exceptions yet may not be absolutely and unlimitedly true of which I know not whether I formerly gave you an instance even in that Axiom which almost all meerly Natural Philosophers have supposed and built on that ex nihilo nihil fit which tho at least one of the highest of gradual or collected Truths may yet be not universally true since for ought we know God that is acknowledged to be a Being that is infinitely perfect may have and may have exercised the power of Creating And in such Cases as this not to be able to reconcile a truth concerning a privileged thing with a Proposition that generally passes for true and in other Cases is so indeed will not presently oblige us to reject either Proposition as false but sometimes without destroying either only to give one of them a due limitation and restrain it to those sorts of things on which 't was at first grounded and to which 't was because of mans ignorance or inconsiderateness that 't was not at first confin'd And if the Miracles vouch'd either for the Christian or for any other Religion be any of them granted to be true as almost all mankind agrees in believing in general that there have been true Miracles it cannot well be deny'd but that Physical Propositions are but limited and such as I called Collected Truths being gathered from the settled Phaenomena of Nature and are lyable to this limitation or exception that They are true where the irresistible power of God or some other supernatural Agent is not interpos'd to alter the course of Nature Pyrocl. But do you think there are no inconsistent Propositions that you would call Truths wherein you cannot shew that one of them is but a gradual or emergent Truth Arnob. 'T is one thing to inquire whether men have yet discerned or I am able to make out that one of the Propositions you speak of is but a limited truth and another to inquire whether speaking absolutely and universally it may to any Intellect appear to be no more than such For first I consider that the Reason why we judge things to be repugnant Being that the Notions or Ideas we have of them seem to us inconsistent if either of these notions be wrong framed or be judged of by an unfit Rule we may think those Propositions to be contradictory that really are not so as if you heedfully mark it you shall find that those that are wont to employ their imaginations about things that are the proper Objects of the Intellect are apt to pronounce things to be unconceivable only because they find them unimaginable as if the Fancy and the Intellect were Faculties of the same extent Upon which account some have so grosly err'd as to deny all immaterial

Negative we assert is grounded not upon Axioms taken from the usual course of Nature or upon Propositions dubious or remote from the first Principles of knowledge but upon either Catholick and Metaphysical Axioms or else upon Truths manifestly flowing from some clear tho inadequate notion we have of the nature of the things we treat of The other Case is when we have a clear and sufficient proof by Revelation or otherwise of the positive Attributes of the things we contemplate for then we may safely deny of that Subject any other thing that is really inconsistent with that positive Attribute Upon which account it is that tho we do not fully comprehend what God is yet knowing by the clear Light of Nature and if we be Christians believing it upon the account of Revelation that he is a Being Intelligent and infinitely perfect we may safely deny against Epicurus Vorstius and Mr. Hobbs that he is a Corporeal Substance as also that he is Mortal or Corruptible Pyrocl. I shall not trouble you Arnobius to inlarge upon your last Advice but willingly receive the ●avour of your next Arnob. Which shall be this The Third Advice or Rule That a matter of Fact or other Truth about Privileg'd Things being prov'd by Arguments competent in their kind we ought not to deny it meerly because we cannot explain or perhaps so much as conceive the Modus of it 'T is no very difficult Task to justifie this Advice but I may do it the better if you give me leave to frame and premise a Distinction for want of which I have observed a want of Clearness in several Discourses where the term Modus has been employed for sometimes we would deny so much as a possibillity that one thing can belong to or be truly said of another as when we say we understand not how one Creature can create another or how there can be a Line that is neither straight nor crooked or a finite whole number that is neither even nor odd But most commonly we mean by our not understanding the Modus of a thing that we do not clearly and distinctly conceive after what manner the Property or other Attribute of a Subject belongs to it or performs its operations The first kind of Modus may for distinctions sake be called a possible Modus and the other an actual modus Now in both the foregoing Acceptions of the term Modus we may find Instances fit for our present purpose For we cannot imagine How a short Line or other finite Quantity can be endlesly divisible or on the contrary how Infinite Parts should make but a Finite Total and yet Geometry constrains us to admit That it is so But tho there be but few Instances of this kind yet of the other sort of our Nescience of the Modus of things there may be found more Instances than we could wish there were for even in natural and corporeal things the eager disputes of the acutest Philophers and the ingenuous Confessions of the most judicious and moderate sufficiently manifest that as yet we know not the manner of operating whereby several Bodies perform what we well know they bring to pass And not to enter into those nice and tedious Disputes of the cause of the Cohesion of the parts of matter in the smallest most principal and most primary Bodies perhaps without going out of our selves the way whereby the Rational Soul can exercise any power over the humane body and the way whereby the Understanding and the Will act upon one another have not yet been intelligibly explain'd by any And the like I may say of the Phaenomena of the Memory especially in those in whom that faculty is eminent For 't is a thing much more fit to be admired than easie to be conceived how in so narrow a compass as part of a Human Brain there should be so many thousand distinct Cells or Impressions as are requisite to harbour the Characters or Signatures of many Languages each of them consisting of many thousand differing Words besides the Images or Models of so many thousand Faces Schemes Buildings and other sensible Objects and the Ideas of so many thousand Notions and Thoughts and the distinct Footsteps of almost innumerable multitudes of other things and how all these shall in so narrow a compass have such deep and lasting Impressions made for them and be oftentimes lodged so exactly in the order wherein they were at first committed to the memory and that perhaps many years before that upon a sudden command of the Will or a slight casual Hint a whole set of Words Things and Circumstances will in a trice as it were start up and present themselves even in the very Series order and manner that so long before belong'd to them And I doubt not but that besides those abstruse things about the Modus of which the more candid Philosophers have confessed their Ignorance there would many others have been taken notice of if we did but as seriously and impartially inquire into the Nature of all the things we are pleased to think we know And when I reflect on the yet depending Disputes between Philosophers and Mathematicians about the nature of Place and Local Motion which are things so obvious and familiar to us I should tho I had no other Inducements be inclin'd to think that we should find difficulties enough in many other Subjects wherein we do not now take notice of any if we particularly studyed their nature and that our acquiescence in what we have learned about many things proceeds not from our greater knowledge of their nature but from our having exercised less curiosity and attention in considering it And if in things Corporeal that are the familiar objects of our Senses we are often reduc'd to confess our Ignorance of the Modes of their inexisting or operating I hope it will not be denyed that to a Being wholly unapproachable by our Senses natural Theology may be allowed to ascribe some things whose Modus is not attainable by our understanding As the Divine Prescience of future Contingents which as 't were impious to deny as to the truth of the thing so I fear 't is impossible to explicate as to the Modus of it Eugen. If it were at this time proper for me to meddle with things of that kind I should not much scruple to say in favour of the Christian Religion that divers Tenents granted both by Christians Jews and Heathens as parts of natural Theology to me seem as difficult to be con●ived as divers of those Mysteries that for their unintelligibless are fiercely opposed in Reveal'd Theology I will not take upon me to judge of others but for my part I confess I do not much better understand how an Intellect and a Will and Affections are distinctly inexistent in God in such sort as they are wont to be attributed to him than how in him there can be a Trinity stated not as some Schoolmen explicate or rather darken it