logical activities displayed in connection with those atoms; that is, both the psychical and physical sides of the one substance-matter must go together, and, if the latter be removed from any grouping of atoms, the former must go with them. 5. According to this newest materialistic definition of matter, the physiological activities of the brain must be in this sense co-extensive with its psychological activities. 6. But according to the experiments of Ferrier, Fritsch, and Hitzig, one whole hemisphere of the brain may be taken away, and one-half the body paralysed in consequence, and yet the mental operations remain complete. 7. "The physiological activities of the brain are not co-extensive with its psychological activities." This is Ferrier's own language, of which he does not seem to see the philosophical importance. 8. Matter, therefore, is physiologically demonstrated not to be a double-faced unity with inseparably conjoined spiritual and physical properties. 9. But the psychological changes taking place in the mind must have an adequate cause. Evolution equals involution. There cannot be in the effect what does not exist in the cause: if there could be, there would be an effect without a cause. 10. The adequate cause of the psychological changes taking place in the mind does not exist in the physiological changes going forward in the brain; for, other things being equal, effects must vary when their causes vary; and the half of the brain may be taken away, and the mind yet perform with completeness all its operations. seasons. Many writers have taught that the connection of cause and effect may be tested in three ways,-either by taking away the cause, and noticing that the effect ceases; or by introducing the cause, and noticing that the effect springs up; or by making the cause vary, and noticing that the effect varies. We cannot take the moon out of the heavens, and we cannot dip the tides out of the sea; and so, in regard to the tidal motions of the ocean, we cannot apply the first two of these tests. But we can use the third; for we notice, that, when the sun and moon are in conjunction, the tides are higher than at other We observe that the tides follow the moon, and always vary according to its position. Now, this is precisely the test that I apply in reading under the law of causation the philosophical import of the latest physiological facts. We cannot take apart the body and soul, and then bring them into conjunction, noticing first the effect of their separation, and then that of their union; but we can cause the one to vary somewhat, and notice the variation, or absence of variation, in the other. We take away a hemisphere of the brain, and do not produce the variation in the mind which it is perfectly clear ought to follow if materialism is true. Bain's pretence, that the antagonistic qualities of matter and mind inseparably co-inhere in one substancematter, is inconsistent with such a fact as Ferrier brings before the world, when he says, as all physiologists say, that you may take half a brain away, paralysing half the body, and yet leave the mental operations memory, imagination, affection, choice, reason, perception, the whole list of faculties-complete. We vary the supposed cause, and the supposed effect does not vary; and this is proof that it is not an effect. It is to be expected that a small diminution of vigour in mental action may follow the taking away a hemisphere of the brain; but in a large brain this effect is hardly perceptible. Take away half the force of the bellows of your organ yonder, and your anthem proceeding from the organ is less loud; but all its notes and rhythms remain. In the brain is your anthem in the bellows, or in the musician's fingers? Materialism is a stupid peasant that for ever stands behind the organ, and can see only the bellows, and never the musician; and asserts, when the latter wears Gyges' ring, that he does not exist, and so would blunderingly account for the anthem by the bellows and organ alone. II. As the adequate cause of physiological changes in the mind cannot be found in matter, it must exist outside of matter. Hermann Lotze is for ever reiterating as the great maxim of his philosophy, "Exceptionally wide in the universe is the extent, entirely subordinate is the mission, of mechanism." This is the keynote of the deepest philosophy of Germany at this moment, that mechanism is to be found everywhere in the universe, but that it is everywhere the horse, and not the rider. "Exceptionally wide in the brain," Hermann Lotze would say, "is the extent, but wholly subordinate is the mission, of the nervous mechanism." We must remember that this very mechanism, the known origin of which is left in such mystery by materialists, is woven by the bioplasts with a sufficient cause behind them. We must study that cause by its phenomena, as we study any other object in Nature. As many unprejudiced students as have seen Lionel Beale's preparations and exhibitions of tissues under the microscope, have, he says, hopelessly abandoned materialism. A fascination not easily described attends the study of living movements under the microscope, as a kind of conviction there comes to you, which no diagrams convey, that life and mechanism are two things. I am properly conscious of the fact that I am no microscopist. Perhaps I had better reveal, however, that it happens that I have the opportunity to use, at any hour of the day or night, what I suppose to be by far the best microscope in Boston. It belongs to a professor, a physician, who has made histology a specialty, and who was so kind as to invite me to use his magnificent instrument. It is what the books call a one-seventy-fifth objective; and the highest power Beale is using is only a one-fiftieth. This prince among microscopes is in Tremont Temple building now; and it shows a white blood corpuscle nearly as large as the silver piece called a sixpence ; and even Lionel Beale's best instruments show it hardly larger than a three-cent piece. Dissections of brains are offered to my inspection frequently; and, although I have no right as a student of religious science to do so, I seize eagerly every opportunity to study the physiological side of philosophy as one part of religious science. Let me say that only the other evening, in this very Temple, in company with experts who all believed in Lionel Beale, and not in the mechanical theory of Häckel, I saw living bioplasm pass and repass through the field of this exceptionally excellent instrument. I had read all Beale says of bioplasmic movements; I had impressed upon myself the intricacy of the work done by the bioplasts; I had minutely studied the best coloured plates; and I thought I knew something of the difference between the action of life and that of merely physical force but, when I saw bioplasm itself in movement [such as is represented here], I felt myself in the presence of an entirely new revelation of the inadequacy of materialism, with all its prate about chemical forces, to account for the weaving, I will not say of a brain, an eye, an ear, or a hand, or of nerve within nerve, and of bone beneath muscle, but of the humblest and simplest living fibre that ever a bioplast spun. Think of the various activities of the one substance bioplasm ! The fluid that lubricates the eye is thrown off by the same matter that constructs bone. The muscle and the tendon are woven on one loom. Take that which you drink at your tables, and call milk, and what is it but smooth cell-walls thrown off by the bioplasts, and now, in their absence, sliding over each other as a beautiful fluid ? What is this instrument of three thousand strings, which we call the ear, but a mass of cell-walls woven together by bioplasts? How are we to account for the miraculous retina and lenses of the eye? They came from the same loom that weaves the brain. How is such variety of effects to be accounted for with no variety of mechanism? 12. Outside of matter is to be found only what is not matter, that is, an immaterial cause. 13. The existence of that cause is demonstrated by the application of the axiomatic truth, that every change must have an adequate cause. 14. This same law demonstrates the externality and independence of this cause in its relations to the cerebral mechanism. 15. The relation of this immaterial agent to the body, therefore, is that of a harper to a harp, or of a rower to a boat, and not that of harmony to a harp. 16. The dissolution of the brain, therefore, no more implies the dissolution of the soul than that of a musical instrument does that of an invisible musician who plays upon it, or that of a boat does that of the rower. 17. Death, therefore, does not end all. Therefore, for the third time, by an independent line of argument purely physiological, we conclude, 18. If death does not, what does or can? To outline now a third argument, let me ask you to notice in all their relations to each other this series of propositions : 1. It is a physiological fact that every human being once breathed by a membrane, then by gills, then by lungs, and once had no heart, and then a heart with but one cavity, and then a heart of four cavities.1 2. The particles of the body are continually changing. 3. In the metamorphoses of insects, not only are the particles of the body changed, but its entire plan is altered. Will you, my friends, but picture to yourselves the change of plan which must be made when a creeping creature is transformed into a flying one? Your beautiful tropical butterfly was once a repulsive chrysalid. It had only the power of crawling. But the bioplasts wove it. Little points of transparent, structureless matter were moving in it, were throwing off cell-walls in it, and bringing these walls into the shape, now of a tendon, now of a muscle, now of a nerve, and so completing the whole marvellous plan of a crawling creature; disgusting in our first sight, a miracle at the second. But now these same bioplasts, which, according to materialism, have nothing at all behind them but chemical forces, suddenly catch a new and very brilliant idea, namely, that they will weave a flying creature. Whence comes that? Out of matter; for matter has a physical and a spiritual side. They thereupon, without any new environment, with the same sun above them, and the same earth underneath them, and the same food, begin to execute a wholly new plan, or rather to carry out one held in reserve from the first. They weave anew; there appears within, and rising out of, the creeping, odious worm, your gorgeous tropical butterfly; and he is the same. There is identity between that flying creature and that creeping creature. Are they two, or one? You breathed by gills once; you breathe by lungs now. Is your identity affected in the change? Your bioplasts wove you, so that once you had a heart of one cavity, and now have one of four. Are you the same? Is your identity affected through all these changes? Every few months, the flux of the particles of the living tissues carries away all the particles in the entire physical system. How do we retain identity? Matter has a physical and a spiritual side, indeed. While all the matter that composed my body has gone in the flux of growth, I am I, however. I have an ineradicable conviction that I am the same person that I was years ago; and yet, years ago, there was not in my body a particle that is now there. I have an ineradicable conviction that the butterfly is identical with the crawling worm; but the characteristics of your worm are left behind when there appears in the worm a resurrection to a new life. What if your butterfly were in all his parts as invisible as he is in some portions of his wings; and what if, to human ken, through sight or touch, there could be no account given whatever of that creature woven out of the loathsome chrysalid? What if, out of that discarded organism, were to arise something equally glorious with the butterfly, but wholly invisible, would this change be more miraculous than the rising of that visible winged creature out of that body? I think not. If God can lift the visible out of the chrysalid, may He 1 Draper, Physiology, p. 550. not be able to lift the invisible also? Yes; but you say that this is Christian materialism. I beg your pardon: I know what thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls rise for utterance as we face life in death. I do not assert that the soul is material; nor do the Scriptures do so, where they affirm that there is a spiritual body as there is a natural body. What that means, I need not here, in the presence of so much learning greater than mine, discuss; but I do affirm, that if God, instead of lifting a visible, were to lift an invisible, flying creature out of the worm,-insect or man!-He would perform no greater miracle than that He does now. Nothing more inconceivable would it be to lift a wholly invisible new form out of a chrysalis than one partially invisible. The change need not be greater; and He who can do the one miracle, and does it day after day before our eyes, can do the other. 4. In all the flux of the body the soul retains conscious, personal identity. 5. The unity of consciousness, and the sense of continuous personal identity, require adequate explanation. 6. Nothing can exist in an effect which did not previously exist in the cause. 7. Effects must change when causes change. 8. If conscious personal identity were an effect of the matter comprising the physical organism, it ought to exhibit as an effect the same flux which exists in its supposed cause. 9. No such flux is observed in the effect. 10. Therefore, the cause of the sense of personal identity is not to be found in the matter of the organism. 11. As only matter and mind exist in the universe, that cause must be an immaterial agent existing in connection with the physical organism. 12. That agent is known to consciousness, and is called the soul. 13. Its existence is not only known to consciousness, but is demonstrable by the law of causation, which requires that every effect must have an adequate cause. The unity of consciousness and the permanence of personal identity are supreme German arguments against all forms of materialism. This is the birthday of Thomas Carlyle. Eighty-four years ago, in the stern year in which Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and Charlotte Corday, went to the scaffold, there came into the world the first prose poet of our time, and the most lofty and vivid imagination, except Richter's, since Milton. Is it not fitting that on this day, at least, we should listen seriously to a man who has thought boldly, and with no narrow mental horizon? "You have heard," says Carlyle, and in perfect freedom from all bias but that of genius, "St. Chrysostom's celebrated saying in reference to the Shechinah, or ark of testimony, visible revelation of God among the Hebrews: "The true Shechinah is man.' Yes, it is even so: this is no vain phrase; it is veritably so. The essence of our being is a breath of Heaven. This body, this life of ours, these faculties, are they not all a vesture for that Unnamed? We touch Heaven |