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Wurtz, president of the French Association, was discussing before that body the same theme, and closing an opening address with no unscientific indistinctness as to what cause signifies. "It is in vain,” he said, "that science has revealed to it the structure of the world and the order of all the phenomena: it wishes to mount higher; and in the conviction that things have not in themselves their own raison d'être, their support and their origin, it is led to subject them to a first cause, unique and universal God." 1

So much does Tyndall's Address lean on Professor Draper's book, on "The Intellectual Development of Europe," that it is a witticism of the London press, that the discourse is rather vapoury when stripped of its drapery; but Draper himself, in an elaborate chapter of his "Human Physiology" (pp. 283-290), undertakes, by an argument on the absolute inertness of nerve arcs and cells in themselves considered, to demonstrate physiologically the existence, independence, immateriality, and immortality, of the soul.

7. The established definition is supported, and Tyndall's is not, by the intuitive belief of the mind as to personal identity.

All the particles of the body are changed within seven years, as science used to teach, or within one year, as it now teaches; and, trite as the power of this objection to materialism has made the objection itself, the inquiry is now more pertinent than ever, How is it thinkable, if matter evolves the personality, that this remains the same, while the physical man does not retain its identity during any two circuits of the seasons?

Mysterious, indeed, is the phenomena of the persistence of physical scars in living flesh that is constantly changing its composition. But grant that the physical basis of memory is an infinite number of infinitesimally small brain-scars, constantly reproduced, although the particles of the brain are all changed, still it is as unthinkable that these scars should rebuild themselves as that the original cuts should cut themselves. It is the generally-accepted theory of metaphysical science, that the soul builds the body, and not the body the soul. But if it be assumed that matter does evolve spirit, then, in the case of the physical basis of memory, it must be supposed to be hand, chisel, inscription, and marble all at once, and not only so, but the reader of the inscription; and all this while every particle of the marble is known to crumble away, and to be replaced by entirely new particles, every twelve months. Flatter contradiction to that principle of the inductive method which asserts that every change must have an adequate cause does not exist anywhere than inheres in all attempts hitherto made to evolve from matter the soul's ineradicable conviction of personal identity.

According to Tyndall's proposed definition, there is in man, as in the universe, but one substance: in the microcosmus, as in the macrocosmus, all is double-faced matter,-- spiritual on the one side, and physical on the other. There is nowhere any immaterial agent separate from a material substance. The particles of man's

1 Address republished in "Nature," Aug. 27, 1874.

body are endowed with physical and spiritual properties, and are so peculiarly grouped, that their interaction produces not only his organisation, but his inmost spiritual nature. To say, however, that although the body in its living state loses all its particles, and although these are replaced by new, the old form is yet retained, and that this similar grouping of the particles explains the continuity of the consciousness implied in the sense of personal identity, is to introduce design without a designer. Collocation of parts in an organism is precisely what materialism has never yet explained. Undoubtedly oxygen and hydrogen have such properties, that, if four atoms of the former and eight of the latter come into proper collocation with each other, they will unite, and form water; but they have no properties tending to bring them together in precisely these proportions. Collocation has ever been a word of evil omen to the materialistic theory.

The particles that go out of the system do not transmit their spiritual any more than their physical qualities to the new particles that come in; for the spiritual qualities, as the changed definition of matter states, inhere in the very substance of each particle; and inherent properties are not transferable. When, therefore, we exhale and perspire wasted particles, there is plainly no room left by this definition for denying that we perspire latent soul, and exhale latent personality. In a complete renewal of the particles of the organisation, therefore, there ought to be a renewal of the personality. Such is the theory; but right athwart the only course it can sail in juts up the gnarled rock of man's necessary belief that he does not change his personality: a reef, this, with its roots in the core of the world a huge, hungry sea-crag, strewn already with the wrecks of multitudes of materialistic fleets, and where the new materialistic Armada is itself destined to beach on chaos.

8. The established definition is justified; and Tyndall's is not by the notorious failure of science to produce a single instance of spontaneous generation.

9. Admissions of the opponents of the established definition exist in abundance to prove, that, if taken in connection with the hypothesis of a creative personal First Cause, it explains all the facts which physical science presents; but these same opponents admit that their definition, even when the doctrine of evolution is accepted, brings the physical inquirer at the end of every possible path of investigation always face to face with insoluble mystery.

10. Finally, the mystic and transcendental definition, by making matter a double somewhat, possessed on its physical side of the qualities claimed for it by established science, but on its spiritual side of the properties necessary to evolve organisation and life, attributes to matter self-contradictory qualities, and is itself inherently self-contradictory.

Matter has extension, impenetrability, figure, divisibility, inertia, colour. Mind has neither. Not one of these terms has any conceivable meaning in application to thought or emotion. What is the shape of love? How many inches long is fear? What is the colour of

memory? Since Aristotle and St. Augustine, the antithesis between mind and matter has been held to be so broad, that Sir William Hamilton's common measure for it was the phrase, “the whole diameter of being." But it is proposed now-and this is the chief thing I have to say-to adopt a definition of matter which shall make extension and its absence, inertia and its absence, impenetrability and its absence, divisibility and its absence, form and its absence, colour and its absence, co-inhere in the same substratum. To this monstrous selfcontradiction the mystic hylozoism of Bain, Huxley, and Tyndall, inevitably leads when it defines matter as a double-faced unity, physical on the one side, and spiritual on the other. The reply to this transcendentalism of the evolution school is simply the first law of the syllogistic process, A is not Not-A.

1. Matter and mind have two sets of qualities, each the reverse of the other, and absolutely incapable of co-existence in the same substance.

2. We know that the two sets of qualities exist.

3. We know, therefore, that there are two substances in which the qualities inhere.

4. There is, therefore, a separate immaterial substance.

As to practical inferences from this discussion, it is worth while to note that

1. The new philosophy as to matter is consistent with a belief in the Divine existence, but not with that of the immortality of the soul. Alexander Bain thinks it absurd to talk of the freedom of the will. Häckel teaches that the will is never free.1

2. Teachers of the inductive sciences must not be allowed to play fast and loose with the axioms which lie at the basis of the inductive method. Physics scorning metaphysics is the stream scorning its source. Science, of course, is not science, unless it is inductive. But behind the inductive sciences is an inductive method; and behind the inductive method are the laws of thought. Inductive science implies inductive method; inductive method implies syllogism; syllogism implies axioms; axioms imply intuitive beliefs. Of necessity resting on metaphysics, science has nothing surer than its axioms of intuitive truth; but on precisely those axioms rest the inferences of free-will, responsibility, and the existence of a personal First Cause. Plaintively wrote Aristotle, after mentioning self-evidence, necessity, and universality as the traits of intuitive truth, that they who reject the testimony of the intuitions will find nothing surer on which to build.

3. A distinct definition of the word natural ought to put, and ultimately will put, all science on its knees before a personal God.

Charles Darwin and Bishop Butler define this fundamental term in the same way; and that not the obscure, heedless, misleading, outworn, and fathomlessly vexatious way common in our brilliant periodical literature. It is a fact in which much solace for timid Christians, and much taming anodyne for audacious small philo

1 History of Creation, vol. i. p. 237.

sophers, lie capsulate, that the foremost naturalist of our times, and the greatest modern Christian apologist, explicitly agree in affirming

(1.) That "the only distinct meaning of the word natural" is stated, fixed, or settled;" and,

(2.) That "what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent mind to render it so that is, to effect it continually or at stated times-as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once."

These far-reaching propositions consist wholly of celebrated words from Butler's "Analogy" (part i. chap. 1), the book which Edmund Burke used to recommend to the acutest of his friends as a cure for scepticism. Barry, the artist, for whose varied and inveterate spiritual sickness Burke prescribed only the study of this volume, was so much benefited by it, that, when he made a painting of Elysium, he placed Butler in the foreground. In our haughty day this renowned passage has become in a new degree famous by being adopted through many editions as the postulate motto on the titlepage of Darwin's "Origin of Species." It stands there as a headlight. The agreement of Darwin and Butler as to the meaning of the word natural is a beacon which ought to be kept steadily in view by any who grow dizzy as they float, perhaps anchorless, in the surges of modern speculation. Butler's and Darwin's definition is Aristotle's and Kant's and Hamilton's, and Newton's and Cuvier's and Humboldt's, and Faraday's and Dana's and Agassiz's. Just this definition has for ages been the established one in religious science. Of late, as if it were a new discovery, it has appeared as the inspiration of the loftiest portions of modern literature. The vision of what lies behind natural law constitutes the hushed "open secret," which throws the Goethes and Richters, and Carlyles and Brownings, and Tennysons and Emersons, and ought to throw the whole world, into a trance.

4. A miracle is unusual, natural law is habitual, Divine action. The natural is a prolonged and so unnoticed supernatural.

Professor Asa Gray maintains that Charles Darwin is guiltless of all atheistic intent; that he never denied the possibility of creative intervention in the origin of species; that he never depended exclusively on natural selection for the explanation of variations in animal forms; and that he never sneered at the argument from design, to which John Stuart Mill advises philosophers to adhere in their proof of the Divine Existence.

If religion and science are once agreed in adopting Darwin's and Butler's meaning of the word natural, all that either of them has to do is to become, in Coleridge's phrase, intoxicated with God.

5. It follows, however, as a minor result of this definition, that it cannot be dangerous to religion to inquire whether the origin of species is attributable wholly to natural causes; that is, to habitual Divine action. Is it a terrifying thing to ask whether life itself and all its modifications originated in unusual Divine action, or in habi

tual Divine action, or partly in one, and partly in the other? It is difficult, and to me impossible, to see what ground for disquietude religious science has in the prospect that either of these propositions may obtain proof. What harm, we may say with Charles Kingsley, can come to religion, even if it be demonstrated, not only that God is so wise that He can make all things, but that He is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all things make themselves?

The distinction between mind and matter stands like a reef in the tumbling seas of philosophy; and its roots take hold on the core of the world. In matter there are definite qualities, such as weight, colour, extension. In mind there are none of these: it is absurd to speak of the length of an idea, the colour of a choice, the weight of an emotion. When Tyndall and Bain, and other revivers of the Lucretian materialism, attempt to make the qualities of matter and mind, which differ as diametrical opposites, and by the whole diameter of existence, extension and the absence of extension, colour and the absence of colour, weight and the absence of weight, inertia and the absence of inertia, co-inhere in one substratum, and talk of a doublefaced somewhat, "physical on the one side, and spiritual on the other," they are self-contradictory. It is upon the hungry tusks of self-contradiction that whole Armadas of materialistic fleets have been wrecked age after age; and here Tyndall's barge of the gods, which, like Cleopatra's,

"Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold,

Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that

The winds were love-sick with them,"

only yesterday sank among the mists. But until this reef is exploded, until the distinction between matter and mind is given up, there will very evidently be adequate proof of Design in creation.

Daniel Webster, when once asked if his political opinions on an important topic had changed, wrote to his questioner to look toward Bunker Hill in the morning, and notice whether, in the night, the monument had walked into the sea. If any do not care to puzzle themselves with either the shrill and shallow, or with the more quiet and profound voices of modern speculation, and yet wish freedom from mental unrest, let them not take alarm as to the argument from design until the Aristotelian and age-long monumental distinction between matter and mind has moved from its base; for, until that shaft walks into the sea, Theism is logically safe. "If," says

Kingsley, "there has been an evolution, there must have been an Evolver." "Faith in an order, which is the basis of science," says Asa Gray, "cannot reasonably be separated from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion." The law of development explains much, but not itself.

6. As science progresses, it draws nearer, in all its forms, to the proof of the Spiritual Origin of Force; that is, of the Divine Immanence in natural law; that is, of the Omnipresence of a personal First Cause;

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