With both these writers there is the common assumption that the mechanist assumes there is a physical and chemical explanation of all phenomena.
These truths are as plain to the mechanist as they are to the vitalist.
Hanbury fixed his eyes on the mechanist with threatening deliberateness.
If you tell any mediocre mechanist of an effect produced in mechanism, he can tell how it is done or how it could be done.
I went to Birmingham yesterday morning to consult a very clever mechanist there about the new movement for the figures of time in my clock--Hah!
So never did any human mechanist who at length had succeeded in the dream and toil of his life.
The novelist shall put what springs and wheels he pleases into his mechanism, but the springs and wheels he places in the mechanist himself, must be those of genuine humanity, or the whole fiction falls to the ground.
A mechanist was then sent to the north, to procure a collection of new machinery; and, after extraordinary delays and difficulties, he embarked with it at New York in February, 1837.
Incredible as it may seem, the Delaware was wrecked off Cayo-Alcatraces, and for the third time the machinery was lost, the mechanist saving himself with great difficulty!
Any structural feature that is useful because of its construction is a structural adaptation; and when such adaptations are given the mechanist has for the most part a relatively easy task in his interpretation.
These assertions that there is something beyond the actions of the conditions of life are met with continually in his work, and they fully and conclusively show that he is no-wise inclined to adopt the mechanist theory.
But this leaves for explanation something which the mechanist cannot explain.
Add to this the consideration that the mechanist theory does not even claim to account for the first origin of the universe: it postulates the existence of matter in motion.
Such a conception may be the most worthy one that we can form of a perfect mechanist or chemist, though it may be doubtful how far the idea of having his services dispensed with for the future would be wholly satisfactory to him.
But further: if God exists, He must have other attributes besides those of a mechanist or a chemist.
But many of the constructions of God possess attributes, which exhibit other qualities in their maker than those of a perfect mechanist or chemist.
The creations of the mechanist and of the chemist are destitute alike of feeling, reason and volition, a moral nature, conscience, and spiritual affections.
Later the mechanist no longer grants the need of the initial fillip.
The man who has accepted the universe of the mechanistor determinist is not always gloomy.
Professor Huxley goes on to say that the mechanist may, in turn, demand of the teleologist how the latter knows it was so intended.
But when we touch a spring, it is the occasion on which the Mechanist himself, who is always present, though invisible, and who must know well how to move them, sets them instantly in motion.
