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Shining the Light of Wisdom and Truth
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In the second place, to understand that logic must be valid is to see at once that this thing we all know, this thought, this mind, cannot in fact be really
alien to the nature of the universe. Or, putting it the other way around, the nature of the universe cannot be really alien to Reason.
We find that matter always obeys the same laws which our logic obeys. When logic says a thing must be so, Nature always agrees. No one can suppose that this
can be due to a happy conincidence. A great many people think that it is due to the fact that Nature produced the mind. But on the assumption that Nature
is herself mindless this provides no explanation.
To be the result of a series of mindless events is one thing: to be a kind of plan or true account of the laws according to which those mindless events
happened is quite another. Thus the Gulf Stream produces all sorts of results: for instance, the temperature of the Irish Sea. What it does not produce is
maps of the Gulf Stream.
But if logic, as we find it operative in our own minds, is really a result of mindless nature, then it is a result as improbable as that. The laws whereby
logic obliges us to think turn out to be the laws according to which every event in space and time must happen.
The man who thinks this an ordinary or probable result does not really understand. It is as if cabbages, in addition to resulting from the laws of
botany also gave lectures in that subject; or as if, when I knocked out my pipe, the ashes arranged themselves into letters which read: 'We are the ashes
of a knocked-out pipe.'
But if the validity of knowledge cannot be explained in that way, and if perpetual happy coincidence throughout the whole of recorded time is out of the
question, then surely we must seek the real explanation elsewhere.
More books by C.S. Lewis
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