EDISON'S BELIEF IN A VAST INTELLIGENCE

Southland Times, Issue 16841, 18 September 1911, Page 3

EDISON'S BELIEF IN A VAST INTELLIGENCE

Edison is slow to discuss the great mysteries of life, but is of reverential attitude of mind, and ever tolerant of others’ beliefs. He is not a religious man in the sense of turning to forms and creeds, but, as might be expected, is inclined, as an inventor and creator, to argue from the basis of “design” and thence to infer a designer. “After years of watching the processes of Nature,” he says, “I can no more doubt the existence of an Intelligence that is running things, than I do the existence of myself. Take, for example, the substance, water, that forms the crystals known as ice. Now* there are hundreds of combinations that form crystals, and everyone of them, save ice, sinks in water. Ice, I say, doesn’t, and it is rather luck for us mortals for if it had clone so we would all be dead. Why? Simply because if ice sank to the bottom of rivers, lakes, and oceans, as fast as It froze, these places would be frozen, up, and there would be no water left. l£hat Is only one example out of thousands that to me prove beyond the possibility of a doubt that some vast Intelligence is governing this and other planets.”