and of grown men to make up the form of an elephant by stacking themselves together, two men making a leg of the elephant, six or eight his body, three or four his head, one or two his proboscis. You see in the pictures from India representations of elephants, made up, as you notice when you look at them sharply, wholly of human forms. Now, to carry out this parallel, we must have our first canvas bag transform itself into many canvas bags, and then all of them build themselves up, after this Indian fashion, into the elephant, the lion, the giraffe, or the palm-tree, the date, or the pomegranate; and these must live. They must grow. Some of the miraculous sacks will drop away from day to day; but new ones must take their places, and fill out the design had in view at the first. Of course, the part assigned to the man in the proboscis of an elephant thus built must be very different from that assigned to a man in the leg. If an elephant is to be made up in that way, the men who form his back must have a very different position from the men who form the tusks. There must be very peculiar activities put forth by each man in each part of your elephant. So, although our bioplasm is, to all appearance, the same thing when it weaves a tendon, and when it weaves a muscle, and when it weaves a nerve, its activities are very different. Surely the invisible molecular machinery must be very complicated indeed; for it makes a tendon here, a muscle here, or a nerve here. According to Spencer and this astute materialistic school, the bioplasts are nothing but molecular machinery, started off by "stimulus" into all this weaving, as the spark starts off the gunpowder into explosion. We say, that, if that is so, the molecular machinery must be more than exceedingly complex; for not only must it really be very different when it weaves a nerve from what it is when it weaves a muscle; but,-and this is the point on which to fasten supreme attention,-when we run back the examination of all our co-ordinated tissues, we find that assuredly all this molecular machinery must in some way have existed, or have been provided for, in the first little transparent, colourless, and apparently structureless bioplast which began to weave your elephant or your man, your pomegranate or your palm. A rather complicated kind of molecular machinery to be crowded into a space so small! The acorn which hangs above the nest of your eagle has in it bio: plasts that differ under the microscope in no particular from the little mass of bioplasm in the eagle's egg. Your bioplasm tha' weaves your oak is, to all human investigation, the same thing with the speck of bioplasm which weaves your eagle. Gentlemen, there is no inductive evidence of the existence of this mechanism. We may say, therefore, that, in the present state of knowledge, we cannot prove that molecular mechanism, acted upon by physical and chemical forces, is the sole source of organisation. 4. Matter in living tissues is directed, controlled, arranged, so as to subserve the most varied and complex purposes. Only matter and mind exist in the universe. Matter in living tissues must therefore be arranged either by matter or by mind. No material properties or forces are known to be capable of producing the arrangements which exist in living tissue. In the present state of knowledge, these arrangements must be referred to mind or life as their source. 5. Bioplasm exhibits peculiar actions found nowhere in not-living matter. It exhibits different actions in every different animal and vegetable tissue. For each class of these peculiar actions, there must be a peculiar cause. That cause must be either matter or mind. But the cause has qualities which cannot, without self-contradiction, be attributed to inert matter. It must therefore exist in the life, or an immaterial element of the organisation. 6. It is plain that, before the matter which forms the tissues has entered the organisation, the plan of the tissues is involved in the earliest bioplasts. There is forecast involved, therefore, in the action of the bioplasts. "Bioplasm prepares for far-off events," says Professor Lionel Beale over and over. Forecast is not an attribute of matter, but of mind. An immaterial element exists, therefore, in living organisms. 7. There is a great fact known to us more certainly than the existence of matter: it is the unity of consciousness. I know that I exist, and that I am one. Hermann Lotze's supreme argument against materialism is the unity of consciousness. I know that I am I, and not you; and I know this to my very finger-tips. That finger is a part of my organism, not of yours. To the last extremity of every nerve, I know that I am one. The unity of consciousness is a fact known to us by much better evidence than the existence of matter. I am a natural realist in philosophy, if I may use a technical term : I believe in the existence of both matter and mind. There are two things in the universe; but I know the existence of mind better than I know the existence of matter. Sometimes in dreams we fall down precipices, and awake, and find that the gnarled savage rocks had no existence. But we touched them; we felt them; we were bruised by them. Who knows but that some day we may wake, and find that all matter is merely a dream? Even if we do that, it will yet remain true that I am I. There is more support for idealism than for materialism; but there is no sufficient support for either. If we are to reverence all, and not merely a fraction, of the list of axiomatic or self-evident truths, if we are not to play fast and loose with the intuitions which are the eternal tests of verity, we shall believe in the existence of both matter and mind. Hermann Lotze holds that the unity of consciousness is a fact absolutely incontrovertible and absolutely inexplicable on the theory that our bodies are woven by a complex of physical arrangements and physical forces, having no coordinating presiding power over them all. I know that there is a coordinating presiding power somewhere in me. I am I. I am one. Whence the sense of a unity of consciousness, if we are made up, according to Spencer's idea, or Huxley's, of infinitely multiplex molecular mechanisms? We have the idea of a presiding power that makes each man one individuality from top to toe. How do we get it? It must have a sufficient cause. To this hour, no man has explained the unity of consciousness in consistency with the mechanical theory of life.1 There is not in Germany to-day, except Häckel, a single professor of real eminence who teaches philosophical materialism.2 The eloquent Michelet, the life-long friend and disciple of Hegel, lectured at Berlin University in the spring of 1874 in defence of the Hegelian philosophy as a system. Out of nearly three thousand students he obtained only nine hearers. Helmholtz, the renowned physicist of Berlin, has come out through physiology and mathematical physics into metaphysics; and his views in the latter science are pretty nearly those of Immanuel Kant. Wundt, the greatest of the physiologists of Heidelberg University, which leads Germany in medical science, has made for years a profound study of the inter-relation of matter and mind; and he rejects materialism as in conflict with self-evident, axiomatic truth. Hermann Lotze, now commonly regarded as the greatest philosopher of the most intellectual of the nations, and who has left his mark on every scholar in Germany under forty years of age, is everywhere renowned for his physiological as well as for his metaphysical knowledge, and as an opponent of the mechanical theory of life. I look up to the highest summits of science, and I reverence properly, I hope, all that is established by the scientific method; but when I lift my gaze to the very uppermost pinnacles of the mount of established truth, I find standing there, not Häckel, nor Spencer, but Helmholtz of Berlin, and Wundt of Heidelberg, and Hermann Lotze of Göttingen, physiologists as well as metaphysicians all; and they, as free investigators of the relations between matter and mind, are all on their knees before a living God. Am I to stand here in Boston, and be told that there is no authority in philosophy beyond the Thames? Is the outlook of this cultured audience, in heaven's name, to be limited by the North Sea? The English we revere; but Professor Gray says that there is something in their temperament that leads to materialism. England, green England! Sour, sad, stout skies, with azure tender as heaven, omnipresent, but not often visible behind the clouds; sour, sad, stout people, with azure tender as heaven, and omnipresent, but not often visible behind the vapours. Such is England, such the English. We are to extend our field of vision to the Rhine, to the Elbe, to the Oder, to the Ural Mountains; and, when we look around the whole horizon of culture, the truth is, that philosophical materialism to-day is a waning cause. It is a crescent of the old moon; and, in the same sky where it lingers as a ghost, the sun is rising, with God behind it. 1 See Lotze's greatest work, Mikrokosmus, Leipzig, 1869. Vol. i. book 3, chap. 1. 2 See art. on "Philosophy and Science in Germany," Princeton Review, October 1876, PP. 752-755. VIII. DOES DEATH END ALL? THE NERVES AND THE SOUL.' "It needs not that I swear by the sunset redness, And by the night and its gatherings, And by the moon when at her full, That from state to state ye shall be surely carried onward." KORAN. "Die Kraft, die in mir denkt und wirkt, ist ihrer Natur nach eine so ewige Kraft, als jene, die Sonnen und Sterne zuzammenhält. Ihre Natur ist ewig, wie der Verstand Gottes, und die Stützen meines Daseins-nicht meiner körperlichen Ercheinung-sind fest, als die Pfeiler des Weltalls."-HERDER, Philosophy of History. PRELUDE OF CURRENT EVENTS. SAFE popular freedom consists of four things, and cannot be compounded out of any three of the four-the diffusion of liberty, the diffusion of intelligence, the diffusion of property, and the diffusion of conscientiousness. In the latter work, the Church is the chief agent; and her most important instrumentality we call the Sabbath. Goldwin Smith very subtly says that it is free religion and hallowed Sundays which explain the average moral prosperity of America. We have had in the last week, in Boston, a somewhat obscure and erratic convention, advising America to do better than she has thus far done in following the New-England ideas concerning Sunday. Give America, from sea to sea, the Parisian Sunday, and in two hundred years all our greatest cities will be politically under the heels of the featherheads, the roughs, the sneaks, and the moneygripes. Abolish Sunday, and the social sanity it fosters, and, in less than a century, the conflict between labour and capital would issue here in petroleum fire-bottles. Capital in our great muncipalities is fleeced now to the skin. Does it wish such social insanity to spring up as shall cut it through the cellular integument to the quick? If it does, let capital abolish Sunday. Working-men desire to build co-operation up into a palace for themselves and their little ones; and God speed their effort to protect their own! But how can co-operation succeed without the large confidence of man in man? and how can that come without the moral culture given by the right use of Sundays? Co-operation fails because men are not honest. How are men to be made honest without a time set apart for religious culture? That population which habitually neglects the pulpit, or its equivalent, one day in seven, can ultimately be led by charlatans, and will be. 1 The fifty-third lecture in the Boston Monday Lectureship, delivered in Tremont Temple. I am no fanatic, I hope, as to Sunday; but I look abroad over the map of popular freedom in the world, and it does not seem to me accidental that Switzerland, Scotland, England, and the United States, the countries which best observe Sunday, constitute almost the entire map of safe popular government. Sabbath is a day of religious culture and cheerful rest. Its biblical warrant is found in the re-affirmation by the Sermon on the Mount of the whole moral spirit of the Decalogue. I affirm, without fear of successful contradiction by any cultured thought, that the Sermon on the Mount re-affirms the moral spirit of the Decalogue, and in that re-affirmation perpetuates the direction to hallow one-seventh portion of our time; it matters very little which seventh. "Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together," is apostolic precept, as it was apostolic example. No doubt small critics may show that the apostles and our Lord did works of necessity and mercy on the Sabbath; and so do we, and so will we to the end of time. But the Sermon on the Mount re-affirms your first, your second, your third, your fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth commandments. How are you to show that it does not re-affirm the fourth in spirit? "Not one jot or tittle shall ever pass from the law till all be fulfilled." It is fifteen hundred years now since Constantine put into execution the law bringing one day in seven an unwonted hush on all industry in the Roman dominion. Here we are ten centuries off from the time when Christianity closed her chief political struggles. Here is a republic built chiefly by Christianity, and perfectly free, and governing more square miles than ever Cæsar ruled over. This nation calls peace to her industries one day in seven. She sends nine millions of her population, one in five, to a World's Fair, and shuts the door every Sunday. I know what report says about the evasions and hypocrisy of the Centennial Commission in admitting persons surreptitiously into the buildings on the Sabbath against the vote to close the grounds on that day. If the report is correct, the Centennial Commission ought to have public rebuke, unless it can make adequate explanation. I am glad to see that even this erratic convention, dazzled out of sight by the sound ideas and majestic words of the Episcopal congress, was wise enough to proclaim that it did not wish to introduce into America the European Sunday. Hallam says that European despotic rulers have cultivated, as Charles II. did in the day of the "Book of Sports," a love of pastime on Sabbaths, in order that their people might be more quiet under political distresses. "A holiday Sabbath is the ally of despotism." Wherever the Romish or Parisian Sunday has prevailed for generations, it has made the whole lives of peasant populations a prolonged childhood. America, I venture to say, is satisfied with the record of the Sabbaths in her World's Exhibition. This convention seemed to think, however, that the burden of a great reform was laid upon its shoulders. It apparently thought its thin meetings the representation of a large constituency. Men are strangely full of company sometimes, when before the mirrors of high self-appreciation. Sidney Smith, calling on a nobleman, passed through a room full of mirrors, which showed him several images of his own form approaching from many directions. He was wholly alone; but he was overheard to say, A meeting of the clergy, I see.' THE LECTURE. Suppose that the musician at your organ yonder has on his finger Gyge' ring, which according to the Greek mythology, as you remember, made the wearer invisible. It is entirely clear, is it not, that if we were to approach and study that instrument while it is in action under the fingers of this invisible musician, we should find in it no authority for attributing the anthem proceeding from the organ to the inert matter composing the organ? We should have, on the contrary, |