Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Matter

Matter, abstractly and absolutely considered, cannot have borne an infinite duration now past and expired.

Atheists must confess that, before that assigned period matter had existed eternally, inseparably endued with this principle of attraction; and yet had never attracted or convened before, during that infinite attraction.

It is utterly unconceivable that inanimate brute matter, without the mediation of some immaterial being, should operate upon other matter without mutual contact.

It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that those primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them: even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first creation.

These nobler faculties of the mind, matter organized could never produce.

Some have dimensions of length, breadth, and depth, and have also a power of resistance, or exclude everything of the same kind from being in the same place: this is the proper character of matter or body.

An accidental mode, or an accident, is such a mode as is not necessary to the being of a thing; for the subject may be without it and yet remain of the same nature that it was before; or it is that mode which may be separated or abolished from its subject.