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to Agassiz's grave; take with you those yet moist sheets of the last number of the American Journal of Science and Arts; read over Agassiz's tomb the latest utterance of the highest and gravest authority in American geological science, and you may bring solace to a hovering, mighty spirit for an unfinished task. You will read Dana's latest words: 1 For the development of man, gifted with high reason and will, and thus made a power above Nature, there was required, as Wallace has urged, a special act of a Being above Nature, whose supreme Will is not only the source of natural law, but the working-force of Nature herself. This I still hold." You say that Agassiz was unduly theistic, and assumed that there is nothing in evolution. Dana is more cautious. The present state of knowledge, he says,' favours the theory that "the evolution of the system of life went forward through the derivation of species from species, according to natural methods not clearly understood, and with few occasions for supernatural intervention. The method of evolution admitted of abrupt transitions between species; but for the development of man there was required the special act of a being above Nature, whose supreme will is the source of natural law." Huxley has come; Huxley has spoken; Huxley has gone; and Dana, over Agassiz's grave, joins hands with Agassiz in the Unseen Holy, to affirm that man is the breath of God.

It is notorious that evolutionists concede,

37. That "molecular law is the profoundest expression of the Divine Will." This is Dana's language.3

38. That, therefore, even if the nebular hypothesis be accepted, design in creation yet stands proved.

39. That, even if spontaneous generation under molecular law were demonstrated, the fact of design in creation would yet stand proved.

If you will elaborately master Professor Stanley Jevon's famous work on the "Principles of Science," you probably will come to his theistic conclusions, even if you believe in the possibility of spontaneous generation under molecular law. We have had important works on the logical method and order, from Aristotle to Kant and Hamilton; and yet, Professor Pierce of Harvard being judge, there have been few more important productions on that theme than the "Principles of Science," by Stanley Jevons, professor of logic and political economy at Owens's College, Manchester. He is an evolutionist; but he is also a logician.

“I cannot," he says, " for a moment admit that the theory of evolution will alter our theological ideas. The precise reason why we have a backbone, two hands with opposable thumbs, an erect stature, a complex brain, about two hundred and twenty-three bones, and many other peculiarities, is only to be found in the original act of creation. I do not, any less than Paley, believe that the eye of man manifests design. I believe that the eye was gradually developed;

1 American Journal of Science and Arts. October 1876, p. 251.
2 Geology, pp. 603, 604.

3 Amer. Jour., October 1876, p. 250.

but the ultimate result must have been contained in the aggregate of causes; and these so far as we can see, were subject to the arbitrary choice of the Creator." 1

It is notorious that even Tyndall concedes,—

40. That if a right-hand spiral movement of the particles of the brain could be shown to occur in love, and a left-hand spiral movement in hate, we should be as far off as ever from understanding the connection of this physical motion with the spiritual manifestations." It is conceded by Dana,

41. That the possession by man of free-will and conscience shows that he must have been brought into existence by a being at least as perfect as himself; that is, by an agency possessing free-will and conscience.

42. That evolutionists are of two schools, the extravagant and the moderate, or the wholesale and the discriminating; and that the former do, and the latter do not, account for man by the theory of evolution.

Häckel concedes,—

43. That the theory of man's descent from apes is, according to the admission of the wholesale evolutionists, deductive, and not inductive,—a result of speculation, and not of observation.

44. That it probably can never be established by the inductive, that is, by the most strictly scientific method.

Do you suppose that I think that this audience can be cheated? I do not know where in America there is another weekly audience with as many brains in it; at least I do not know where in New England I should be so likely to be tripped up if I were to make an incorrect statement, as here. "The process of deduction," says Häckel, "is not based upon any direct experience. Induction is a logical system of forming conclusions from the special to the general, by which we advance from many individual experiences to a general law. Deduction, on the other hand, draws conclusion from the general to the special, from a general law of nature to an individual case. Thus the theory of descent is, without doubt, a great inductive law, empirically based upon all biological experience. The theory, on the other hand, which asserts that man has developed out of lower, and, in the first place, out of ape-like mammals, is a deductive law inseparably connected with the general inductive law." 3

The theory of man's origin from apes is not based upon direct experience. Merely deductive conclusions from circumstantial evidence are sometimes lawful. We do not know all about the worlds beyond the sweep of the telescope; but so firmly is the theory of gravitation established that we believe that, if a new world should be discovered, it would be found to be under the law of gravitation. If you will prove by induction the system of evolution as thoroughly as the Copernican system has been proved by induction, you may then fill gaps by deduction. Astronomers predict sometimes that eclipses will occur, and they do occur according to prediction; and we think,

1 Professor W. Stanley Jevons, Principles of Science, vol. ii. pp. 461, 462. 2 Fragments of Science, pp. 120, 121, 3 Häckel's History of Creation, vol. ii. p. 357.

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therefore, that we have ascertained something conclusive as to the mechanism of the heavens. If evolutionists can by selective breeding produce from the same stock two varieties so widely differing that their crossing will produce sterile hybrids, then I will say that they have a scientific right to fill up by deduction the gaps in the direct evidences of evolution, and not till then.

Professor Häckel further concedes,

45. That "most naturalists, even at the present day, are inclined to give up the attempt at natural explanation" of the origin of life," and take refuge in the miracle of inconceivable creation." 1

The trouble with your small philosopher in Massachusetts and England is, that he out-Darwins Darwin and out-Häckels Häckel. It is important, at times, that the pulpit should show that it is not afraid of these topics; and you will notice, that, in this Lectureship, the theme of evolution is not skipped.

You will pardon me one further word on Bathybius, which Professor St. George Mivart calls a sea-mare's nest.

"No more of that, Hal, an thou lovest me."

Häckel has minutely figured Bathybius in the plates of his most elaborate works. Huxley named it from Häckel, Bathybius Hackelii. Strauss rested on Bathybius the central arch of his argument against the supernatural.

It was the haughty claim of Huxley and Strauss and Häckel,— 46. That Bathybius is an organism without organs.

47. That it performs the acts of nutrition and propagation.

48. That, with other organisms like itself, it stands at the head of the terrestrial history of the development of life.

49. That it spans the chasm between the living and the not-living. 50. That it renders belief in miracle impossible.

Häckel makes Bathybius a stem from which all terrestrial life divides, and comes to its present state." It would not be worth much for me here to cut down this or that bough in the great tree; but if, with the latest scientific intelligence, I may strike at its bottom stem, Bathybius, I shall have done something. You must not think that students of religious science have no right to be interested in this classical organism. We have heard of it in theological works. We had it thrust in our faces as proof that a miracle is impossible. We therefore are interested, when, walking past our bookstores, we can pick up the yet fresh sheets of the American Journal of Science and Arts, and turn to a passage on Bathybius in an article on the voyage of the ship " Challenger." Will gentlemen here do themselves the justice, and this topic the justice, to read this authoritative intelligence (October Number, pp. 267, 268)? You will find there this closing concession :

51. That Bathybius has been discovered in 1875 by the ship "Challenger" to be-Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth!-sulphate of lime; and that, when dissolved, it crystallises as gypsum.

1 Häckel's History of Creation, vol. i. p. 327.
Ibid., vol. i. pp. 184, 344 and vol. ii. p. 53.

IV.

THE MICROSCOPE AND MATERIALISM.1

ὀλιγοδρανέες, πλάσματα πηλοῦ, σκιοειδέα φῦλ ̓ ἀμενηνά.

ARISTOPHANES: Aves, 686.

Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft.'

Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;
Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt!
Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen
Die ird'sche Brust im Morgenroth.

GOETHE: Faust.

PLATO in his Phædon represents Socrates as saying in the last hour of his life to his inconsolable followers, "You may bury me if you can catch me." He then added with a smile, and an intonation of unfathomable thought and tenderness, "Do not call this poor body Socrates. When I have drunk the poison, I shall leave you, and go to the joys of the blessed. I would not have you sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the interment, 'Thus we lay out Socrates; or, Thus we follow him to the grave, and bury him.' Be of good cheer: say that you are burying my body only."

"2

Materialism teaches that there is nothing in the universe but matter and its laws; that there is no spíritual substance; and that what is called mind or soul in a man is but a mode of force and motion in matter, and cannot exist in separation from the body.

If materialism is the truth, you and I cannot die as well as Socrates did. If that part of us which thinks and loves and chooses is not separable from our present material frames, our souls are like the electrical charges in the glands of the poor torpedo-fishes, certain to cease to exist as soon as the cells which originate them have been dissolved. On the Peruvian coasts of South America, men drive horses down to the edge of the great deep, in order that they may receive shocks from electric-eels; and sometimes the hoof of a horse will smite the life out of one of his tormentors; and then the wrecked

1 The forty-ninth lecture in the Boston Monday Lectureship, delivered in the Meionaon, 2 Plato, Phædon, 115; Jowett's Flato, vol. i. pp. 465, 466; Grote's Plato, vol. ii. p. 193.

swimming creature ceases for ever to be an electric battery, because the cells in which the electricity originated are destroyed once for all. Now, materialism is the doctrine that the soul is in some sense secreted by the brain, as electricity is by the cells of the torpedofish or electric-eel, and that, when the brain is dissolved, the soul is no more. I do not call this an impious inference, if it be, indeed, an inference fairly deducible from facts; truth is truth, even if it sears our eyeballs; I call it, however, a withering inference. I am not prejudiced against any conclusion reached through clear ideas; but the momentous issues involved in the affirmations of materialism make me anxious to look into these cells, which Häckel and Büchner and Moleschott say originate the soul. Cabanis, as Carlyle narrates with grimmest humour, thought the brain secreted soul as the liver does bile. This philosophy, and the gospel according to Jean-Jacques, were, we know, two of the broadest and blackest of the far-flapping Gehenna wings that fanned the furnaces of the French Revolution.

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It is not commonly known, except among specialists in microscopical physiology, that the latest science has something to say to us of immense import as to the relations of matter and life. That theme comes home to the business and bosoms of all men; and, whatever be the verdict of full investigation, all will be eager to face it, who seek, as we do here, whatever is new and true and strategic in religious thought. On the doctrine of organic cells and living tissues, there is surely no book over fifteen years old that is not largely worthless. A text-book on geology, it is often said, is out of date as soon as it is printed. So swift has been the advance of microscopic investigation, that our cell-theory, which began to be elaborated in 1838, has made its supreme advances since 1860. "All life from a cell: we have heard that doctrine since 1840. "All life from bioplasm," which is the core of the organic cell, we have heard as a scientific truth since about 1860. The first physiological microscopist in the English-speaking world is now Professor Lionel Beale of King's College, London; and his work on "Protoplasm, or Matter and Life," published with elaborate original plates, some of which are of as late a date as 1874, is one of the most important contributions made to knowledge recently by any original investigator of this central question of questions,-whether, when the cells of the brain are dissolved, the soul, like so much electricity developed through them, is dissipated for ever.

You remember, gentlemen, that in Dresden the great picture of the Madonna di San Sisto has an interior which everywhere suggests an ineffable exterior. Many look upon that painting, and study the hushed, shoreless awe and self-surrender of the eyes of the cherubs in the lower part of the transfigured canvas, and do not ask on what the cherubs are looking. But to cause the observer to ask that, is the chief object of this inspired part of the painting. The Madonna di San Sisto was made for an altar-piece. It was intended to stand before burning incense. In a great cathedral its place would be behind the altar, on which incense is burned to ascend to an unseen

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