of quality, the mind refuses assent, that any process, based on the
foundation of accurate human knowledge, would sanction the emergence
of mind by physical processes from matter. Mind is the antithesis, and
cannot be a function, of matter.
The mind is intimately linked with cerebral action. We do not know mind
apart from brain; but there is no discovered correlation between the
_work_ of the brain, and consciousness. Dr. Tyndall, whose keen and
instructed intellect has addressed itself to this deep problem from
the position of a physicist, says, amongst many similar utterances:
‘But when we endeavour to pass ... from the phenomena of physics to
those of thought, we meet a problem which transcends any conceivable
expansion of the powers which we now possess. We may think over the
subject again and again, but it eludes all intellectual presentation.
We stand at length face to face with the incomprehensible. The
territory of physics is wide, but it has its limits, from which we look
with vacant gaze into the region beyond, ... and thus it will ever
loom, compelling the philosophies of successive ages to confess that—
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our life
Is rounded by a sleep.”’[24]
[Footnote 24: _Fragments of Science_, vol. ii. pp. 393, 394.]
The same thinker asks, ‘What is the causal connexion ... between
molecular motions and states of consciousness?’ And he answers that
neither he nor any other can know; and adds: ‘It is no explanation
to say that the objective and subjective are two sides of one and
the same phenomenon. Why should the phenomenon have two sides? This
is the very core of the difficulty. There are plenty of molecular
motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or
feel when it runs into frost ferns upon a window pane? If not, why
should the molecular motion of the brain be yoked to this mysterious
companion—consciousness?’[25]
[Footnote 25: _Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 410.]
Says Professor Tait, one of our most distinguished physicists: ‘There
are ... things associated with living beings which, of course, no one
in his senses can regard as physical. Even such things as consciousness
and volition we have absolutely no reason, however vague, for
classifying even in the smallest degree under the head of physics.’[26]
[Footnote 26: _Recent Advances in Physical Science_, p. 70.]
‘I,’ writes Professor Huxley, ‘know nothing whatever, and never hope
to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular
movement to states of consciousness is effected.’[27] And again, ‘All
our knowledge is a knowledge of states of consciousness. “Matter” and
“force” are, so far as we can know, mere names for certain forms of
consciousness.‘[28]
[Footnote 27: _Contemporary Review_, Nov. 1871: ‘Mr. Darwin and his
Critics.’]
[Footnote 28: _Lay Sermons_, p. 373.]
Such disparity is there, then, between matter and mind, that it would
be apparently as congruous to conceive of a thought as solidifying
itself into a material object, as to conceive of any affection of
material molecules as being the sole cause of thought. Hence, it
follows that the Spencerian philosophy, which affirms the absolute
distinctness of mind from matter, on the one hand; but, having no other
structural elements _than_ matter in motion, on the other hand, seeks
to educe mind from these, is surely incongruous, and fails.
The demand is, that the primal atoms of the cosmic cloud, without
a single logically added agent besides, have, by combining and
recombining, by changing size and shape and intensifying the complexity
of their motions, at last emerged into ‘I am,’ ‘I can,’ ‘I ought;’ that
in effect they have written Faust and Hamlet, produced philosophies,
discovered gravitation, calculated eclipses, realized the eternal
nobility of right and the eternal baseness of wrong: in brief, have
brought about the moral and intellectual manhood that is ours. What we
_know_ by scientific evidence is this: that the persistence of force
makes the relations of matter and force permanent. Says Faraday: ‘A
particle of oxygen is ever a particle of oxygen, nothing can in the
least wear it. If it enters into combination and reappears as oxygen—if
it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral—if
it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved—it is oxygen with
its first qualities, neither more nor less. It has all its original
force, and only that.’[29]
[Footnote 29: _Philosophical Mag._, iv. 13, p. 235.]
Then, in all the area of the universe as we know it, that is, within
the range of our experience and experiment, infinite vicissitude leaves
what we know as an elementary body, with its first qualities intact,
neither more nor less. But we must transcend experience, disregard the
evidence before us, and _believe_ that if we give the primal atoms with
their inalienable motion _time enough_, they will emerge at last, not
only as life, but as intellect!
Can it avail to repudiate materialism, and yet to philosophically
conjure mind out of matter? We must indeed recast our definition of
matter to do this; but how? Says Professor Max Müller: ‘Mill declares
in one place (_Logic_ v. 3, 3) that it is a mere fallacy to say that
matter cannot think. Here again he ought to define first of all what
he means by matter, and according to his definition it may or may not
be a fallacy to say that matter cannot think. If we say that matter
cannot think, we do not say so because we cannot conceive thought to be
annexed to any arrangement of material particles ... the reason why
we are justified in saying “matter cannot think” is our having in our
language and thought separated matter from thought, our having called
and conceived what is without thought matter, and what is without
matter thought. Having done this, we are as certain that our matter
cannot think as that A=A and not =B.‘[30]
[Footnote 30: _The Science of Thought_, p. 616.]
The verdict of consciousness is the immovable base of all mental
action. Our consciousness affirms our personality and insists on our
identity. The Ego is conscious of itself as the hidden thread of unity
on which are strung all the past and present states of consciousness
and thought. Separate ‘states of consciousness’ as affections of matter
we have seen are impossible. But even if they could exist, _to_ whom
is their existence? A pang of unutterable remorse, a thrill of keenest
pleasure, do not feel themselves. I feel them; what is that I, to whom
the feeling is? It is always there, and in the language of Spencer
already quoted ‘is the unknown permanent _nexus_ which is never itself
a state of consciousness, but which holds all states of consciousness
together.’ Then it is as real and more absolute than the ‘states of
consciousness’ themselves.
The personal pronouns are as plentiful in the language of modern
materialists as in the language of sentiment or theology. What do they
represent?
Looking back and looking forward, thinking of ‘what might have been’
and anticipating what will be; and being absolutely conscious that
it is ‘I’ in unchanged and unchanging identity that am looking back
upon myself, and looking forward to myself, is unthinkable, unless
_something_ to which all successive states of consciousness have been,
are, and shall be, is admitted. If I deny the separate existence of the
Ego, I to all intents and purposes deny that I am, and yet it is I that
am there, perjuring myself by the denial.
Not only is there consciousness and thought, memory and prevision,
power and volition; but the person, the identity that is conscious and
thinks, that remembers and anticipates, that is able and that wills, is
an inextinguishable factor of being. And for this there is no provision
in the formula of the Spencerian Philosophy.
True, as we have seen, it is fain to admit, outside its formula, the
existence of a permanent somewhat lying beneath and outlasting all the
flow of mental states; that it has always existed, that it must exist
for evermore; that it is a ‘power’ sometimes identified with ‘force;’
but it is contended that this is infinitely and for ever unknowable.
With this we cannot be concerned; in practice it is an abstraction
equal to nothing. But it is no element of our analysis; it is no
factor of the formula which contained the only data required by this
philosophy to construct the universe. We cannot assume that this power
was the cause of matter, or the cause of motion; for we are shown that
we can know nothing concerning it. But this also is of no moment; for
matter, motion, and the combinations they bring about, over countless
millenniums of time, clearly understood, and fully interpreted, are
supposed to contain in themselves, the explanation of all that is. But
surely the promise of this philosophy is unfulfilled, its pledge is
broken; it left its formula at the very outset of its career, and has
employed structural principles, which to _it_ are absolutely alien.
Then to affirm that mind does not exist is impossible; to affirm
that matter gave origin to mind is a contradiction. There is but one
alternative: it is, that in the beginning, mind, acting through and in
matter, by immutable and perfect modes, through unmeasured time, caused
matter to assume its forms and display its phenomena; and, being mind,
imparted mind to the universe wherever it is found: crowning all, in
the moral and intellectual nature of man.
Thus the ultimate demand of thought, of reason, and of consciousness,
is that when we are unravelling the modes of phenomena, pushing our
inquiries into the conditions of all existences, generalizing vast
areas of knowledge, expressing in formula of geometry and numbers
the splendid rhythm and order of all things in heaven and earth,
we are simply finding, and expressing, the thoughts of an Infinite
Intelligence; discovering the modes by which His immutable perfections
were caused to take form in matter and mind.
It is science alone that can discover and express the _mode_ of action;
it is theology alone that must strive reverently to lead the mind up
from the mode, not to the _conception_, but to the inevitable existence
and thought of the Creator.
In doing this, to suppose that there are no intellectual difficulties
is to manifest narrow mental grasp; but there are no absolute
contradictions; no incongruities intolerable to the mind. True, as
we have seen above, we encounter the inevitable fact of the uncreate
existence of the Infinite. But we have seen that this, though
infinitely impenetrable by us for ever, is still not repugnant to
our reasoning and moral faculties. Indeed the eternal existence of
_matter_ as not requiring proof is one of the assumptions of some
materialists. But surely the self and necessary existence of an
intelligent omnipotence is without measure more congruous. It has been
argued that the eternity of matter is thinkable, because matter is
immutable—retains its properties through every vicissitude conceivable
in time and space. But surely gravity is an indispensable quality of
matter; yet take a bar of iron, weighing a thousand pounds at the sea
level, four miles high, and it loses two pounds of its weight; carry
it to the distance of the moon from the earth, and it weighs but five
ounces; and at a distance which could be computed its gravity would be
absolutely lost. It is conceivable that all the ‘modes of motion’ by
which matter is known to us, might, if we knew enough concerning them,
be found to have conditions in which they would cease to operate. We
must know that matter is unchangeable before the argument is valid. But
even then it is incompetent.
What the mind asks, is power and intelligence, to account for the
majesty of the universe, and the existence of mind; and if their cause,
to be such, must be admitted to be uncaused, the majority of reflective
minds can accept this, and in doing so, can fairly rest, and fully hope.
But, this granted, the question shapes itself afresh, ‘In the beginning
what?’ Had matter a coeval existence, an eternal being like God? or
did He create it? bring, what to our senses is something, directly out
of nothing? None dare answer. Both suggestions refuse to be dealt with
by reason. But the incongruity of both might vanish like starlight
in the dawn, if we knew _what_ that is, which constitutes matter. It
would, perhaps, make the Divine mind more immanent than we could dare
to imagine. But it is easier without measure, judged of by our only
source of knowledge, our own mental experience, to conceive of matter
as a product of mind, than mind as a product of matter.
What, then, is it that the reverent mean by a ‘creative act’? What is
involved in the affirmation, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth’? _Must_ the answer be speculative? or does the evidence
of Nature indicate a method? If the answer must be wholly speculative,
it is without a shred of value. But if the _mode_ of creation be a
question of evidence, who are the witnesses? They are those who are
students and masters of the _facts_ of Nature. Willing or not willing,
in the end, we _must_ accept the facts of Science. What, from the very
nature and constitution of our mind, we are bound to accept as truth,
it would be a travesty of all morality to ignore, much more to reject.
What was gained to morals, or religion, by rejecting Galileo’s
demonstration of a revolving earth and a central sun? When Kepler
demonstrated the laws of planetary motion, in the spirit of his age
he was obliged to suppose that the direct motion of the planets
was brought about by some spirit influence which he denominated
‘immateriate species,’ capable of overcoming the inertia of material
bodies. But the splendid insight of Newton enabled him to perceive,
that the laws of planetary motion, were a consequence of the cosmical
law of gravitation. This took the moving planets out of spirit hands,
and reduced the music of their motions to a method—a mechanical ‘law.’
To thousands that was deemed a truce to ‘atheism;’ but it is an
unalterable truth; and men yet believe in God.
Within the range of living memory it has been held as vital to the
existence of theology that creation, from the stars that fringe the
margin of the universe, to the earth, and the crown of manhood, arose
in six literal days. But science, with no weapon but inexorable fact,
has made this for ever untenable. But the foundations of religion are
unshaken.
Science has removed whole regions and æons of phenomena, from what was
considered the supernatural, to the natural; but to believe that this
is so much lost to theology is a feeble and faithless fallacy.
That conception of the Great Creator which takes its rise in the
majestic law of universal gravitation must be sublimer than that which
thought of Him as telling off spirits to move, and bear up the planets,
in their paths.
Can that be a higher view of an illimitable Creative Mind, which
conceived of Him as a Power who caused the earth to be formed, and the
heavens to be filled, in six literal days, rather than to think of Him
to whom there can be no yesterday and no to-morrow, but an unchanging
now, as determining laws and forces, which, in the slow progression of
uncounted ages, should express His creative will and accomplish His
Divine idea?
I have read in vain, I have thought in vain, to understand what to
later theologians was the method and the meaning of a creative act.
‘Order is heaven’s first law;’ and law—method—is the very pulse of
order. Surely creative action in matter could only have proceeded by
law? It could only have been the prevision and predetermination, by the
inscrutable Creator, of definite affections of matter by force, issuing
in rhythmic motions and cosmic harmonies, which, by their progress
through immeasurable time, should accomplish the creative purpose.
‘Let there be light;’ that is the equivalent, in human thought, of an
incomprehensible Divine volition. ‘And there was light,’ that is, in
human phrase, the affirmation of its historic accomplishment. But to
those who know, as we at present do, the science of light, what time,
what power, what majesty of method, did its perfect accomplishment
involve!
‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven.’ That,
in human phrase, and according to human modes of thought, expresses the
mysterious intent of Almighty Mind to fill space with the splendour
we see; and to people it with intelligence of which we can form no
faintest vision. ‘And it was so,’ that is the record of the realized
intent. But how realized? Not by a material actor who
‘Rounded in his palm those spacious orbs,
And bowled them flaming through the dark profound.’
That is impossible to thought; a travesty of the sublimer conceptions
possible, even to finite minds. Then do we conceive them as, in our
human sense, leaping into existence and place and relation and motion
and order? All our knowledge repudiates this merely human conception.
The only conception we can justly form is, that in the awful mystery
of creative action, Divine will determined law, modes of affection of
matter by motion, through force: making the dome of heaven and the
peopled earth the realized will of the Eternal.
‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his
kind.’ That is the utterance of the human conception, which can alone
represent to us the Divine resolve to fill the earth with life—and the
joy of living things. ‘And it was so.’ But what epochs of countless
ages filled the incalculable interval! What life on life, through age
on age, moved in stately march from the lower to the higher, while
the rocks kept imperishable record! The facts of geology, so far as
they carry us, are more accurate and certain than any records of human
history. And the irresistible lesson taught by the accurate study of
the fossil flora and fauna, from the dawn of the Laurentian epoch, is a
persistent and upward unfolding of life-forms by law; and the operation
of the law is as manifest, as the operation of the law of increasing
adaptation is visible, in a historical study of naval architecture,
from the first rude plank, the dangerous raft, right up, through all
increasing adjustments and improved design, to the latest ship with
stately curves and splendid speed.
There is a sense indeed in which creation by evolution or development
is taking place for ever around us. Development is evolution beginning
at a fixed point; evolution is only development _ab initio_.
Every spore that unfolds itself into a fern, every seed that gives
origin to another tenant of the forest, every egg that peoples earth or
air or sea with another life, is an instance of development. It is only
abbreviated evolution; evolution which gives a written record of its
laws in every stage, down to the primitive ovum. There the record of
the organism in itself ceases. The primitive ovum is a simple cell. The
worm, the grayling, the eagle, the man, are evolved from such.
But can the egg unfold itself from this protoplasmic speck by any
process save that of predetermined law and energy? Is not every
law that shall act, and all the unchangeable power to enforce it,
contained potentially in that globule of matter which we cannot see?
Every change that is wrought, from the first that is discoverable,
to the last that ensues, in the evolving egg, is one unbroken stream
of method; force, with mandates, as it were, acting on matter, with
special adaptations. Never did human mechanist strive more visibly to
embody his prescribed purpose than do the progressive activities of the
embryo lead straight to the final result. They did not, as movements,
determine their own actions, or the actions of each other; they all lay
together potentially from the first.
In this, if you will carry back the conception of Divine law and
purpose to the beginning, and apply it to the incomprehensible majesty
of the universe, I can see a miniature of suggestion as to the creative
method.
Can it strip theology of one ray of the splendour of Deity, to find,
from the evidence of nature, that He thought, and willed into action,
the balanced forces and immutable laws, which were so related to each
other, and to the foreseen requirements of onward and upward movement,
that their progress is music, and their products are harmonies?—perfect
adjustments—and, amidst ever-changing circumstances, ever-changing
adaptations and self-adjusted design?
Can there be any splendour of the Infinite mind more ineffable and
effulgent than the evidence, in His works, that in the beginning He
determined the potency and prevision of all the life, and all the
adaptations, that ever have emerged or can emerge?
Will it be urged that this one comprehensive law of creative action,
with all its methods and potentialities complete in the beginning,
must denude history of miracle? must make all things inevitable
sequences, and every outcome in nature through all time only what must
be, when the moment for its emergence had come? And that therefore the
unforeseen would be impossible. I submit that such an inference is not
inevitable. The universe becomes one lasting act of the unsearchable
but immanent Eternal. The power by which the self-adjusting mechanism
of the universe acts, took its rise, and has its continuity, in Him.
A miracle, in its broadest aspect, is a wonderful event; something,
which from the known course of phenomena, science could not previse.
Science would stultify her past and make impossible her future, if
she affirmed that the unprevised and marvellous could not happen.
Says Professor Huxley: ‘A miracle, in the sense of a sudden and
complete change in the customary order of nature, is intelligible,
can be distinctly conceived, implies no contradiction; and therefore,
according to Hume’s own showing, cannot be proved false by any
demonstrative argument.’[31]
[Footnote 31: Huxley’s _Hume_, p. 133.]
Our knowledge of the observed processes of nature erects no mental
barrier to the occurrence of something never before observed.
Miracles are not, it is now broadly admitted, dependent on science,
but on _evidence_ for their possibility and truth. Nay, more, it is
conceivable that, what to us might be profoundly miraculous, might be
the outcome of sheer and unmodified natural law.
If we could annul the interval of time between the great minds of the
long past and bring them into direct and intelligent contact with the
most marked victories of modern research and genius, what would be
the effect? Let it be imagined that Aristotle or Plato could stand by
while Tyndall demonstrated to them in Athens, that they could hold
direct and instant intercourse with a friend in India; or proved to
them, that we can demonstrate the actual constituents of the sun and
stars, and their physical conditions, with the same certainty as we can
determine the analysis of an earthly compound; or bid the sunbeam paint
the portrait of a bird or beast in rapid motion; or let them gaze upon
the marvellous world of the minute unfolded by the modern microscope;
and I do not hesitate to say that if he were the Aristotle or Plato of
his own age, standing before these triumphs of this age, he would be
standing in the presence of absolute miracles. Yet how have these, to
Plato, unforeseen and wonderful events arisen? Only by discovery of,
and absolute obedience to, the _laws of nature_ as they are for ever
and immutably acting. Man has created nothing, interrupted nothing,
violated nothing: he has obeyed; and by obedience conquered.
Then grant that mind, by infinite wisdom and will, gave origin to this
ever-unfolding universe, by methods that are all and for ever known to
Him, as they can never be known to us, is it according to reason to
contend that nothing shall ever happen _even according to the strict
methods of natural phenomena_ which past experience has never known?
That will happen, on the assumption of a Creative Mind as the origin
of all, which is _needful_, to complete the universe; and what happens
need be no interruption, no turning aside, of the course of nature, but
only sublime compliance with it.
But more: one of the gravest conflicts of sheer material philosophy
with Theism and Theology is, that by mechanical evolution design
is swept clean from the universe; that teleology has received its
death-blow.
Science finds that phenomena are self-acting, and self-adjusting. The
energy is competent; the method is perfect for bringing about the
result investigated. Science can find no more; it asks no more; and
materialism says, there is no more. There is no design in it; it is,
because to be at all, it must be that. There is no design in the form
of the river-bed which the mighty waters have engraved for themselves
in their irresistible movement down the mountain slope and along the
windings of the valley to the sea. It is the result of the force of
gravity. Such is the argument.
But while science as such, in strict obedience to its canons, must stop
at the self-adjustment of immediate phenomena, and materialism will
stop there, the reasoning faculties of the race, as we have seen, will
not stop there. They must come at last, by the laws of reason, upon
the power and the intelligence by which the methods of nature were
made self-acting. Gravitation and the properties of water will account
for the perfect adaptation of the river to its bed, and the bed to
the purpose of a river. But how came gravity? How came the properties
of water? There may be, there is, no direct design in the path of the
Amazon or the Danube; but surely there is magnificence in the design
that caused the great, the cosmic _methods_ of nature so to co-operate
as to cause those rivers inevitably to carve their perfect paths? The
dynamics of nature are self-acting up to the very limit of our power of
research; but after that, and beyond it, what? Why is the _direction_
of nature’s dynamical methods always and everywhere, through all time
and space, beneficent and beautiful?
It is only the design, the teleology, of the old school, touched by the
Ithuriel spear of modern knowledge, and changing into a conception of
universal design, that can only have originated in an infinite mind.
The ‘law of evolution’ and that of ‘variation and the survival of the
fittest’ may, if you will, be held to account for all that narrower
knowledge had attributed to direct design. But evolution, like
gravitation, is only a method; and the self-adjustments demonstrated
in the ‘origin of species’ only make it, to reason, the clearer, that
variation and survival is a method that took its origin in mind. It is
true that the egg of a moth, and the eye of a dogfish, and the forearm
of a tiger _must_ be what they are to accomplish the end of their
being. But that only shows, as we shade our mental eyes, and gaze back
to the beginning, the magnificence of the design that was _in_volved in
nature’s beginning, so as to be _e_volved, by the designed rhythm of
nature’s methods.
Whatever matter may be; whatever force is; or whether or not both
are the one inseverable product of omnipotent volition; the first
affection of matter by force carried with it, potentially, the finished
purpose of the All-wise, whatever that may be. Every instance of what
such writers as Darwin are obliged to write of as ‘contrivance’ or
‘adaptation’ throughout this universe as it now is, or that shall yet
arise in it through all duration, are, and will be, but factors of
related harmony in a stupendously vast interlocked ‘mosaic’ of design,
which in its entirety has a ‘final purpose’ too great for man to see.
It is admitted by the fullest and farthest thinkers, that the
teleological, and the mechanical views, of phenomena and their origin,
are not antagonistic. Instead of mutually excluding each other in
thought, they are the complement of each other.
To argue, that because we can by analysis and research, discover and
demonstrate the physical conditions or antecedents, that, apparently
automatically, bring about a manifest contrivance, therefore, we have
excluded the possibility of any universal primal design, is a mode of
reasoning, the fallacy of which, surely, needs no great logical acumen
to lay bare.
Because we discover the molecular shapes and movements that determine
the structure of a beautiful crystal, it would be surely illogical
and unwarranted to say that there was no design, no arrangement in
the primary order of things, out of which these very conditions
arose. It is conceivable that there may be infinitely more mind in
the origination of that which automatically gives rise to a manifest
‘contrivance,’ than in directly originating it.
An ordinary watch is, as a rule, a good timekeeper, under a fixed,
say a temperate meridian; but take it to the arctic circle, and it
goes too fast; or to the torrid zone, and it goes too slow. But in a
chronometer, delicate compensations are made, of a beautiful kind, so
contrived as to counteract the thermal changes. Would it be logical to
think of the more complex contrivance as devoid of design because it is
self-acting?
I grant that there may not be absolute parity of reasoning in the human
as compared with the natural instance; but I only desire the reasoning
to apply to one essential point. If primarily the methods of nature,
which by their rhythmic action automatically produce contrivances,
living or otherwise, took their origin in mind, the contrivances so
produced were so designed to be produced; and this is contrivance of
an infinitely higher order than the self-compensating balance of the
chronometer. It is contrivances brought about by arrangements that are
infinitely complex, transcending all thought; and which include in
their vast sweep, all time, all space, all matter, all motion, and all
their relations, from the most inconceivably minute phenomenon to the
most stupendous that ever has happened, or can happen, as a product of
nature.
We may easily reduce this to a practical form by illustration. The
arm or fore-limb of all mammals is constructed essentially on the
same type. The forearm of the horse is most highly specialized. In
the forearm there is, as in the human skeleton, the _radius_ and the
_ulna_. But the ulna has lost its function, and is fused with the
radius. What we call the knee in the horse’s fore-limb is really the
wrist. There are eight bones in the human wrist. The horse has only
seven. Now, immediately succeeding the wrist bones in the human hand,
are the five bones that form the palm; and these are followed by the
five digits or fingers.
It appears, then, that, unlike the majority of mammal hands, the horse
is peculiar. Instead of five bones corresponding to the palm bones, it
has only one, which is called the ‘cannon bone;’ and this is followed
by but one digit or finger with a huge nail. The horse then walks upon
a single finger, viz. the third, on each fore foot and each hind foot.
Why is this? and can we discover the history of this modification?
Examine the cannon bone of a horse with care; you will find fixed on
either side of it two delicate bones, called ‘splints,’ with actually
no mission in the economy of the extant horse.
Now go steadily back in geological time. There are three great
geological epochs, the primary, the secondary, and the tertiary. The
recent period called the quaternary is a sub-section of the last. Now
in the quaternary and upper tertiary, fossil horses are found. They
correspond with the horses we see. But in the middle of the tertiary
epoch we come upon the horse, not only in Europe, but in India, and
above all in America, with the splint bones, that we find in extant
horses fixed to the cannon bone, as long as that bone itself, and
provided with small spurious or useless hoofs, while the ulna can be
traced for its whole length.
In the earliest miocene deposits the horse is found with these spurious
or partially aborted toes, no longer useless, but having the full
length of the middle toe; making the horse of that epoch a distinctly
three-toed creature, and each toe operative; while the forearm is in a
condition normal to mammals.
Yet another form, found in America, shows, not only the three distinct
and useful toes, but upon the third toe a splint, suggesting a rudiment
of the little or fifth finger; while in the oldest of the tertiary
rocks has again been found a horse with the fourth finger complete.
While finally, in the very earliest tertiary deposits is found a horse
with a foot of four perfect digits, consisting of the second, the
third, the fourth, and fifth fingers, with a rudiment or splint of the
first finger distinctly visible.
Similar facts reveal themselves in relation to the hind feet and
legs; and slow variations palpably affected the entire body of
the successive types of horse; the teeth, for example, undergoing
remarkable successive modifications: and whilst the _Eohippus_ and the
_Orohippus_, the last types of horse, discovered respectively in the
oldest and later of the eocene beds, possess forty-four teeth, as in a
large number of fossil and extant mammalian forms, the recent horse has
the number reduced to forty, and their forms remarkably altered, as the
final outcome of a succession of modifications.
We have here, then, a series of generic types; for the true relations
of which to each other we are indebted to the insight of such workers
as Huxley and Marsh and Lartet, and others. They do not afford us
illustrations of the minute and scarcely observable modifications which
the law of the origin of species involves; they present us rather with
a series of family groups; but the relation between them is such as
to leave the mind accustomed to biological investigations convinced,
that, could we see all the forms that occurred between them, there
could be no question as to the origin of these forms, from _eohippus_
of the oldest eocene beds to _equus_ of to-day. Unlike as in a general
sense they are, they are progressive modifications, with higher and
higher specializations, until, in the extant horse, the highest special
modification is attained.
It will harmonize with no dogma of theology, and no doctrine of
science, to assume that these equine forms, separated by such enormous
epochs of time, were specially created: all accurate knowledge forbids
the supposition; while varieties sufficiently marked, such as the
race-horse, the giant and powerful dray-horse, the Shetland and the
Norman ponies, known to be derived from a common parentage, give the
clearest sanction to the inference, that what we now know of the
geological history of the horse proves it to be a product of the
Darwinian law of evolution; that there has been no total destruction
of equine (or any other) life in the great past; but that there has
been a continuity of it, borne from region to region, and modified
continuously by a thousand changing circumstances. Consequently we
find, in the rocky records of the past, that organic types become
simpler, and liker to each other, as we trace them through the
incomplete geological record to a dim and far off age.
Here, then, we have a series of such generalized types, plainly related
to each other in time, leading us down from the horse of historic times
to less and less specialized forms of it, as the epoch grows more
remote; until in the upper mesozoic or lower eocene beds, we find the
progenitor of the line of the equine types we know, to be an animal
with a splay foot of five toes, adapted to slow movement in a boggy
soil. The slow specialization adapted it to increasing rapidity and
ease of movement, and modified states of soil; acting, without doubt,
as an increasing protection against its enemies, and providing it
with an ever surer means of obtaining abundant and suitable food. And
beneficial variation continued to act until the noble horse, beautiful
in form, exquisitely graceful in action, and swift as the wind, had
been thus created.
Now the most absolutely assured, the most universally accepted truth
within the whole realm of human knowledge and experience is the
immutability of nature’s laws; and the certainty that their action has
been ‘established for ever’ through all space and all time. Great as
was the knowledge of ancient and classic peoples, that of which they
knew relatively least, was nature. This arose from their inability
to perceive the inexpressible vastness of nature, on the one hand,
and the detailed constitution of the earth and its universal flora
and fauna, on the other. The obvious inference as to the origin of
the universe, as they knew it, was, that all that constituted the
world and its occupants and inhabitants, mineral, vegetable, and
animal, were individual direct creations. But, knowing as we now
know, the immutability and universality of the laws of nature, in
relation equally to the organic and living as to the inorganic and
not-living, and knowing as we do the geological and palæontological
history of the earth, and the nature and characteristics of its living
inhabitants, it is as manifest as the axioms of geometry, that the
direct and supra-natural creation of new species, or even new genera,
is absolutely untenable.
Now modern biological science, guided by the splendid genius and
ceaseless research of Darwin, and the whole field of biologists, for
the past quarter of a century, has been able for all practical purposes
to discover and demonstrate a great ‘law’ or method, according to which
all the varieties of living ‘species,’ animal and vegetable, have
arisen; connecting the remotest ages of the life of the globe with the
present flora and fauna in one unbroken continuity, by one unchanging
method. The organic history of any individual becomes an analogue of
the organic history of the world. The individual begins existence as
a minute ovum, and progresses to completeness. The vast series of
organic forms, fossil and extant, began in one or more ‘primordial
germs.’ The law of all living things, and especially the lowliest,
is rapid and abundant reproduction. Variations in individuals so
reproduced are as absolutely universal as reproduction itself. It does
not require the accurate knowledge of the botanist or the zoologist to
discover this. A careful study of any group of living forms, lowly or
highly organized, will make this palpable to any observer. The septic
organisms, for example, which arise from germs (not those which arise
from self-division) constantly vary; and I have been able to make use
of this tendency so as to enable three of these wonderful organic and
vital specks to slowly change, so as to adapt themselves to changed
environments, until, in the course of years, from normally living at a
temperature of 60° Fahr. they lived at last, and multiplied enormously,
at a temperature of 157° Fahr.; and in the slow process of adaptation,
demonstrated fundamental changes were undergone by the organisms.[32]
[Footnote 32: _Journ. Roy. Micro. Soc._ 1887, President’s Address.]
A study of the Desmids, the Diatoms, the Radiolaria, or the
Foraminifera amongst minute organisms will show that variations are
so constant and so numerous, that the determination of what is called
species, is difficult, and at times, impossible.
Who does not know of the varieties that are annually produced from
seed-growths of favourite flowering plants?—the pelargonium, the
primula, the viola, the rose, and hundreds of others.
That this is not confined to forms under cultivation is equally
manifest. Common observation has not noted it perhaps, but there
are no fewer than thirteen distinct forms of the common bramble or
blackberry, with stem, flower, and fruit sufficiently varied to have
induced some botanists to consider them species. Although each when
seen is called by the majority of people ‘the wild rose,’ there are at
the very least seventeen natural varieties. ‘Artificial selection’ has
had no part in these variations and a thousand others that might be
named.
Consider the variations constantly arising in fowls, canaries, dogs,
and cattle. No litter of kittens is ever precisely alike, or precisely
like either parent; and this is true even in human families.
Variation, then, is constant and universal; it acts in all directions
and in every living thing. If, amidst the exigencies of the history of
an organism, some variation in the progeny is beneficial in altered
circumstances, it is by the very nature of things preserved. The
offspring of all living organisms are greatly in excess of the number
that can reach maturity; and with variations in every organism, and in
every part of their organization, for ever occurring; and environments,
during great cycles of time, undergoing constant and enormous changes;
it is palpable that successive modifications must arise, and through
all the countless ages of the past have arisen: resulting always in
the ‘survival of the fittest’ or ‘natural selection,’ which ‘signifies
the preservation of favourable individual differences and variations,
and the destruction of those which are injurious.’[33] This is
palpable, for individuals possessed of advantage over others must
have the best chance of surviving and multiplying their kind; hence
arise ‘varieties,’ ‘races,’ and ‘species;’ and if the enormous age
of the period of life upon the globe, and the vicissitudes through
which it has passed, be taken into account, it is impossible for a
biologist to withhold consent to the fact that a ‘law,’ a method,
has been demonstrated, which has been a certain and powerful factor,
in producing the variety of the flora and fauna that have filled the
earth, from the dawn of life upon the globe, up to the extant animals
and vegetables which are the latest outcome of this great law. This is
the conviction of all the experts of the world.
[Footnote 33: Darwin’s _Origin of Species_, 6th ed. p. 63.]
That there are other factors of evolution not yet discovered is almost
inevitable; they, however, will be but added ‘laws;’ supplementary and
co-ordinated methods—giving greater completeness to our knowledge of
the origin of species.
But having reached this conclusion, we are at once compelled to ask,
What is the origin of this unceasing continuity of variation in all
living things? this power to become constantly adapted to change of
environment, and for ever, in the fittest form, to survive? Is not this
palpably a creative method? Is it not the emergence in time and history
of the thought and will of the Creative Power in the beginning?—one of
the processes that lay enfolded in the very purpose of the production
of heaven and earth, and which as a prevised method only awaited ‘the
fulness of time’ to come inevitably into play?
The earth, as is well known, and we have already pointed out, is
constantly subject to minute, as well as to smaller cyclic and great
secular, changes. Nothing but an ability to become adapted through all
duration to current and recurrent changes, could have made a continuity
of the living population of the globe possible. We have found the
principal ‘law’ of those adaptive changes. But because we have learned
the nature of the law or method, by which throughout all time, these
changes have been brought about; and because the method _appears_
self-acting like the balance wheel of a chronometer, must we argue that
there is no design either in the method or its results? That will not
satisfy the constant demands of reason. Finding the law according to
which a projectile moves, must not be confounded with the cause of its
motion.
‘Natural selection’ cannot originate anything. Variation does not
explain itself. Why is it a property of all living things to vary
indefinitely and in all directions? The Darwinian law has no existence
without it; but that ‘law’ no more accounts for this tendency, than the
law of falling bodies explains gravitation, or shows why it acts as it
does.
It is easy to explain the law of the compensations of a chronometer
balance, or a compensating clock pendulum; but that does not account
for their existence.
The law of ‘inheritance,’ the likeness of progeny to parents, is, like
the law of variation, universal. But why is it so? If it were not so,
there could be no survival of the fittest. Yet it is no more explained
by the discovery of that law, than the nature of that which thinks, is
explained by a discovery of the laws of thought.
Selection implies alternatives to select from. The splendid organic
mechanism of all the animals of the earth, with their perfect relations
to their sphere, could as a whole, only have been brought about by
means that started for, and led to, that goal. ‘The law by which
structures originate is one thing; those by which they are restricted,
directed, or destroyed is another.’[34]
[Footnote 34: _Origin of the Fittest_, by E. D. Cope, p. 225.]
Then, because the horse becomes specialized and adapted to its
circumstances in a remarkable manner, leaving evidence in the rocks of
long severed but successive epochs, of the very manner in which it was
created as we know it; and because we have proof that this method is
practically self-acting, shall we stultify reason by assuming that in
its self-action there is no design? that as a great rhythmic law it had
no origin? that, because to our powers of observation it is automatic,
it explains its own existence? or that it strips the mind, by this
very automatism, of any necessity for, or right of, having its origin
explained? None of these assumptions are congruous; they surely violate
the fundamental principles of thought.
We may be enabled no longer to say of any structure that it is a
‘final cause;’ our insight is not deep enough for that; but an equally
powerful weapon in defence of theism takes its place: I designate it
‘CONCURRENT ADAPTATION;’ that is, _fitness_, for ever, throughout all
time and all space; and fitness absolutely constant amidst all changes.
Adaptation is universally concurrent with existence; and whether we
have to account for it by sudden and unexplained action, or by the slow
operation of laws, is a matter of no essential moment: _it is there_.
Nothing, for example, can be more certain, than the powerful influence
exerted on the coloration and morphology of flowers, all over the
earth, by the visits of insects. The insects assiduously visit flowers
for food, or nectar; and by their visits the pollen of one flower
is carried to the stigmatic surface of another: so effecting cross
fertilization. The contrivances for making insect agency efficient, are
so numerous, so palpable, and so exquisitely perfect as to entrance
the observer. One flower has its nectar in a tube, to reach which the
proboscis of the visiting insect must touch and split a delicate tissue
and expose the moist adhesive surfaces of a couple of pollen masses,
which adhere to and are carried away by the insect, in such a position
that, in visiting another flower of the same species, it must deposit
the pollen where alone it can do its fertilizing work.
Another flower is so contrived, that to reach the nectar, the visiting
insect must touch a sensitive surface causing the rupture of a tissue,
which confines a pollen mass; but, on the rupture of the tissue, this
flies out like an arrow at the unbidden guest; and an adhesive end
sticks to the insect, which is startled away; but, visiting another
flower of a like kind, deposits, in the right place, the fertilizing
pollen it unconsciously carries.
Another flower has an ingenious arrangement by which it lures an insect
into its corolla, and then imprisons it, provided with plenty of food,
until its anthers are ripe, when it sheds their pollen over the insect;
after which, by a special organic arrangement, it opens the prison door
and lets its visitor emerge, charged with pollen, to visit another
similar flower, which will inevitably be in a condition to receive
fertilization from its pollen-covered body.
Thousands of other instances might be given.
Now we know perfectly the mutability of flowers. It is highly probable
that the visiting insect and the visited flower were wholly unlike,
in some instances, what they now are, twenty thousand years ago; and
it is equally improbable that they will be what they now are, twenty
thousand years hence. But that which this great biological law affirms,
is, that whatever the changes, and however brought about, past or
future, there never has been, there is not, and there never will be,
an instant’s cessation of concurrent adaptation:—the operation of the
‘law’ that secures to all that lives adjustment to its environments.
That surely must be a method that took its origin in mind; and it must
have had its prevised and preordered place potentially assigned, from
the earliest creative movement; as it must continue to have unceasing
action to the very terminus of all organic existence.
Design, purpose, intention, appear, then, when all the facts of the
universe are studied in the light of all our reasoning faculties, to
be ineradicable from our view of the creation. Teleology does not now
depend for its existence on Paleyean ‘instances;’ but all the universe,
its whole progress in time and space, is one majestic evidence of
teleology. The will and purpose running through it are as incapable of
being shut out of our consciousness and reasoning faculties, as its
phenomena and their modes are of being rendered wholly imperceptible by
our senses.
A ‘mind’ that is not a mind, in any sense as we know it, is, to us,
nothing. Will, to be will, to us, must be such as we know of; though
it be infinite. Intelligence that is infinite cannot cease to be
intelligence. To an infinite intelligence, as to us, in the same
conditions, the properties of conic sections must be what we know
them to be. But an Infinite Mind would differ absolutely from ours in
that there could be nothing tentative, nothing experimental in its
methods, through all time and space. Only the right means would ever be
employed, or the right ends ever be brought about. But, surely, even
an Infinite will, in the realm of matter, must _use_ means. When human
power takes a pebble from a great height and places it at the sea-level
it has only done what gravity could have done. But when human will by
continuity of purpose combines materials to form a calculating machine,
we have an evidence of the action of mind; something, which, while it
is made and exists by the very laws of nature, yet the laws of nature
could not, by themselves, have made.
Similar results must be due, then, to similar conditions. The
teleology, that is the inseverable motive, as it were, of all the
activities and interactions of nature, must be the product of mind.
Then was _man_, as a physical being, the terminal link in the great
progressive chain of living forms that had peopled the earth through
countless ages? Or does he, in physical origin, stand apart? Is he a
being from whose existence a new creative epoch dates? Or is he the
final product of the vast ancestral line of life that ran through all
the ages? Did God make man ‘of the dust of the ground’ by some process
of which we can form no conception, and can discover no trace? Or is
there evidence that the Creator made man of the dust of the ground by
majestic laws, acting over vast epochs, until he had become meet for
the inbreathing of a higher nature?
That is a question of profoundest interest. But if the authoritative
and final demonstration were given either way to-morrow, we, in
ourselves, should remain unaltered. We should be conscious of no
uplifting and of no fall. Immediate or mediate creation, if God be
the author, must be alike Divine. To fear the consequences of honest
truth seeking research on this momentous question, is to manifest
little love of truth for its own sake, on the one hand; and little
stalwartness of personal conviction, as to the security of the
foundation of professed beliefs, on the other. Whether we will or not,
the whole matter will be searched to its deepest depths. But amidst all
the conflict of opinion as to details, in one thing all are agreed,
and that is, that the gulf between man and the noblest apes is such
as to be practically without comparison. Whatever science may be able
to show ultimately as to the relation of man to the anthropoid apes,
there is to-day no biologically demonstrated and direct kinship. That
the anthropoid apes, as we know them, were in any proper sense the
_direct_ ancestors of man, is not a serious contention of even extreme
evolutionists. The facts before us do not justify it. The highest ape
is still an ape; and whilst the oldest human remains, such as the
Eugis and Neanderthal skulls, discovered in association with evidences
of immense antiquity, have remarkable characteristics, pointing in
some respects in the direction of the great apes, they are still the
crania of men. After a critical and exhaustive examination of the two
skulls above referred to, Professor Huxley says concerning the Eugis
skull: ‘Its measurements agree equally well with those of some European
skulls. And assuredly there is no mark of degradation about any part
of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which
might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the
thoughtless brains of a savage.’[35] And in summing up the results of
an equally critical examination of the far more remarkable Neanderthal
skull, the same unquestionable authority says: ‘In no sense, then,
can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a human being
intermediate between men and apes. At most they demonstrate the
existence of a _man_ whose skull may be said to revert somewhat towards
the pithecoid type.... And indeed, though truly the most pithecoid of
known human skulls, the Neanderthal cranium is by no means so isolated
as it appears to be at first, but forms in reality the extreme term of
a series leading gradually from it to the highest and best developed
of human crania.’[36] Nothing has arisen to seriously modify these
authoritative statements. No thorough anatomist practically familiar
with the structure of the anthropoids on the one side, and man on the
other, could attempt to argue that man can be directly a descendant
of chimpanzee, gorilla, or orang. ‘I may say,’ says Huxley, ‘that the
fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us
appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of
which he has probably become what he is.’[37]
[Footnote 35: _Man’s Place in Nature_, Huxley, p. 157.]
[Footnote 36: _Man’s Place in Nature_, Huxley, p. 157.]
[Footnote 37: _Ibid._ p. 159.]
But let us beware of mistaking, or even distorting, the true meaning
of this, as understood by the philosophical evolutionist. It does not
for a moment place the physical nature of man outside the range of the
great creative law of natural selection. No arrangement of the monkeys
can present us with a rational order of development, of which man is
physically the latest and highest outcome. But the precursor of man,
of whose actual existence no direct proof has yet arisen, is assumed,
on the evidence of absolutely innumerable details, the full value of
which is only to be clearly seen by experts, to have ascended, not from
any anthropoid,—chimpanzee, gorilla, nor orang,—but these apes are
found to form the nearest branch existing, produced by the same trunk,
out of which, physically, man’s nature was, by the law of descent,
evolved.
That the embryological and anatomical resemblances between man and the
highest apes are of a profound and striking character, no sane educated
man would attempt to traverse; and that this involves close biological
relationship, and proves the operation on each, of the same organic
laws of development, so far as physical origin is concerned, is also
certain.
That there are evidences of an antiquity of the human race, as such,
immensely disproportionate to that indicated in the absolutely
unreliable and useless ‘received’ chronologies, it would be folly to
doubt and immorality to neglect. It is evidenced by man’s works, which
are shown, without question, to be of indefinitely vast antiquity; and
correspond, in the main, with the works of races of men still living.
It is shown by the enormous antiquity of races of men as we know them;
by the vast age of languages, made evident, by a deep analysis of their
structure, as sister and parent languages; as well as by the great age
of even human remains.
Now all this, taken in connection with the anatomical structure and
embryological development of man, makes it impossible to suppose that
man’s physical nature was not a product of the same great creative
laws, the same vital processes, as those that gave origin to the
chimpanzee or the gorilla; a slow creation, through a long line of
varied life, from ‘the dust of the ground,’ the elements of the earth.
There is in this relation an almost marvellous insight in David’s song:—
‘I will give thanks unto Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Wonderful are Thy works;
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My frame was not hidden from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
Thine eyes did see mine unperfect substance;
And in Thy book were all my members written,
Which day by day were fashioned,
When as yet there was none of them.’[38]
[Footnote 38: Ps. cxxxix. vers. 14-16.]
By what link man is united physically to the great series below him,
by what line and in what specific manner he arose, it has not yet been
given to science to determine. Biological science sees, with inevitable
certainty, that he must have been in vital union with that series; that
physically he is a part of the majestic organic whole, from the first
dawn of life upon the globe until now.
At the same time it is equally certain that other agencies which
could not have acted on ape or other mammal, nor indeed on any other
living form besides, came into operation, when man, as such, became an
inhabitant of this earth.
Nor is it by any means other than conceivable that science, which
has transformed the face of the world in fifty years, may be able to
demonstrate the actual physical line of man’s origin. But if that be
so, if the line along which man’s physical nature was moulded of the
dust of the ground, by the Creative Mind and will, were made so plain
that none could refuse the evidence, it may leave undisturbed our
mental peace, and unaltered our conviction of the dignity and majesty
of man. It would leave our responsibilities undiminished, our rights
uninfringed, and our hopes unclouded.
The saint is none the less saintly, because he is ancestrally the last,
and prevised outcome, of an inconceivably grand progression of creative
laws, operating through countless cycles, than he would have been, as
the descendant of a man produced by an isolated act of creation. The
song of the nightingale is no iota less rich in fluent melody because
its larynx was modified from less melodious forms; and the martyrdom
of Paul, or the noble sacrifices of heroes and reformers to secure the
sacred rights of liberty and truth for their fellow-men, are none the
less exalted because we must trace their ancestry to the slow operation
of creative laws, which in the great unbroken stream of life upon the
earth gave origin to the monod, the coral-polyp, the mollusc, the
lizard, the aye-aye, and the chimpanzee. Verily, if the researches of
science demonstrate that this was the method of creative action, we may
not murmur.
The sovereignty of man does not depend on a particular view of the
exact manner in which the Creator caused the elements of the earth to
produce his frame. ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the
ground;’ it is not _how_ He so formed him. None has power to affirm
or to deny how, unless with reverent hands he find it written in the
rocks, or woven indelibly with the very structure of man himself. It is
because men have interpreted, without evidence, the stages of creative
action, and welded these non-essentials with iron girdles of dogma,
that faith has again and again been imperilled.
The true crown of manhood, the final majesty and exalted mystery of
creative power, was not man’s _body_, but his soul. ‘And breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul,’ is the
expression of that which gives his unshared dignity to man.
What is meant by this, who shall explain? Who can peer into the depths
of a mystery so profound? It defies all our powers of search; dare
we make a special interpretation or understanding of how this was
brought about, an essential of belief? Is it not enough that it was the
supreme, as it was, so far as our present knowledge will carry us, the
final outcome of creation?
When the Creative Power and wisdom had built man’s physical nature of
the dust of the ground, whether suddenly or slowly, by this method
or by that, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and
he became a living soul. It was the possession of what we call the
soul that gave to the manhood its being. How this was imparted, who
can know? who shall explain? Even if the very _method_ be at last
discovered, or approximated, the unalterable question must remain,
_why_ the method, the law, brought about so sublime a result, and from
whence came the conditions that made the laws direct themselves to
such an exalted end. In fine, how physical laws could so be caused to
act as to give origin to consciousness, thought, and moral faculties.
Plainly, this ‘end’ must have lain in the Divine ‘beginning;’ and we
must go behind and below the mechanics of phenomena and explain their
_vera causa_; we must find our way above matter not-living in the great
past, and fathom the very essence of the cause that made it live,
before we can attempt to explain the origin of that self in man which
looks upon and _knows itself_. We have seen that matter and force will
not, as sole factors, lend themselves to a philosophy of the origin and
explanation of this. A linear arrangement of the ascending mentality of
brutes does not really explain, or even minimize, the difficulties of
the problem. It simply makes the area of the problem the wider.
‘I am,’ ‘I can,’ ‘I ought,’ ‘I think,’ with equal freedom—of an atom or
a universe, of a rosebud or a Deity, of myself or of my race, of the
grandeur of right and the baseness of wrong—these are the impenetrable
mysteries which no property known to us in matter, and no process ever
seen by us in matter and force, can ever _explain_.
No doubt the most profound and active minds amongst men will always
endeavour to correlate the access even of mind, with modifications of
cerebral and neural matter. But if that be approximately done, the real
problem will remain simply untouched. True, we can afford no better
explanations than those which philosophy offers; but we may not blind
ourselves to the true value of these. Mind is inseverably associated
with neural matter; we do not know, and cannot even think of it, as
emerging as a product of neural matter. We must distinguish clearly
between scientific evidence and plausibilities of a philosophical kind
expressed in scientific language. We shall be fascinated again and
again with a brilliant intellectual arrangement of things known, with
things guessed, leading to hypothetical ‘interpretations’ of the most
impenetrable mysteries. But the fact remains, that the activities of
intellect are inexpressible in terms of matter and motion. Mind only
can give origin to mind. Until it is congruous to think that parallel
lines can enclose a space, that 2+2=7, that out of nothing something
can come, it will be incongruous, in spite of subtle and ceaseless
effort, to construct hypotheses by which _y_ shall by its own act
change into _x_, or, in other words, by which mind, with its absolute
disparity to matter, shall come forth as an unaided and necessary
product of matter as affected by motion.
MORRISON AND GIBS, EDINBURGH,
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