Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: You see 'it is the very same in meaning, but wha is the meaning? The next sentence, "They sup posed philosophers had sufficient intelligence to un derstand; but it appears that they are mistaken,' has not crushed out the desire to fathom Mr Lambert's Bunsbyan thots expressed in a flood of words. The closing words of chapter ii still further roil the flood: "Your quibbles on the word 'law' have been already exposed. Force is the cause of the phenomena. The law is the mere statement of what the force will do in any given case." To see if my little intellect has quite ceased to act I turn back to Ingersoll and read, "Law does not cause the phenomenon, but the phenomenon causes the idea of law in our minds." That seems quite clear to me, and I take courage to go on to chapter iii (16th edition), which Mr. Lambert begins with a quotation from Ingersoll. CREATED UNIVERSE; OR. SELF-EXISTENT UNIVERSE. Ingersoll. "To put a God back of the universe compels us to admit that there was a time when nothing existed but this God; that this God had lived from eternity in an infinite vacuum, and in absolute idleness. The mind of every thoughtful man isforced to one of these two conclusions: either that the universe is self-existent, or that it was created by a self-existent being. To my mind, there are far more difficulties in the second hypothesis than in the first." [In his answer Mr. Lambert separates this into three parts. As the answer to the first half of the first sentence is pretty long I will summarize part of it:] Lambert. "It compels us to admit nothing of the kind. The eternal God can place an eternal act. His creative act could, therefore, be coeternal with his being. The end of the act, that is, creation, could be coexistent with the eternal act, and, therefore, eter...