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  "id": "CH02.P012",
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  "work": "orthodoxy",
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  "work_metadata": {
    "title": "Orthodoxy",
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    "original_publication_year": 1908,
    "alternate_titles": [],
    "subjects": [
      "Christian apologetics",
      "Christianity",
      "Philosophy of religion",
      "Paradox",
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      "English literature, 20th century"
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  "text": "Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.",
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      "title": "The monist’s competing claim to wonder",
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          "prefix": " exactly this unique sensation. ",
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            "question": "What earlier exchange with McCabe gives substance to the claim that his system leaves human life out?"
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      "title": "McCabe and the dispute over a diminished human life",
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          "exact": "Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe",
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          "prefix": "e of it leaving everything out. ",
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      "title": "What a complete explanation can leave out",
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