The Problem with Angels!

Only a man with a limiting philosophy could hold that by observing a simple cause and effect he had therby explained the reality underlying not only that which caused and that which was caused, but also the apparent uniformity of nature wherein change is the norm; or had answered the question arising from the very nature of causation itself. Motion by any understanding of the term provides immediate evidence of direction and its regularity implies control, (the absence of either is chaos), and the mind is obviously neither the measure of that Motion nor its cause.
This essay considers, in layman's language, the first principles involved in our faculty of knowing from the datum of a proposed "pure intelligence", not just to highlight the remarkable activity of the human mind by comparing it to such a conception, but to counteract, psychologically, the blatant a priori denial of the light of reason itself, alas, so common among contemporary philosophers. This is not an argument for the existence of what men understand as the angelic intelligence but a challenge to those who would deny to human intelligence its inexplicable capacity to create concepts and ideas that have no existence in the real world.

Return to essay