human race. Consequently, there must be in man a principle not completely subject to material conditions.

(b) Again: we are free; we are capable of self-determination; but no organic faculty can determine itself. Such an action, as we have already insisted, is repugnant to the essential nature of matter. On the other hand, were our volitions not spiritual, were they, as our opponents allege, merely subjective phases or mental states inseparably bound up with organic processes, did they not proceed from a principle independent of matter, then moral freedom would be absolutely impossible. Man would be devoid of responsibility and incapable of morality. But we have shown that this is not the case, consequently there is in man a factor not essentially dependent on his corporeal frame; in other words, there is in man a spiritual principle.

OBJECTIONS URGED AGAINST THE SIMPLICITY AND SPIRITUALITY OF THE SOUL.-We will here sketch the chief difficulties which have been urged against the simplicity and spirituality of the soul. As the two classes of objections merge into each other we will not attempt to separate them:

(1) In expositions of the coarser, though not least. consistent forms of Materialism, such assertions as the following have been boldly put forward: "La pensée est une secretion du cerveau." (Cabanis.) "There subsists the same relation between thought and the brain, as between bile and the liver." (Vogt.) Moleschott describes thought as 66 a motion in matter," and also as a "phosphorescence" of the brain.2 Other philosophers

2 For an account of modern German Materialism, cf. Janet, Materialism of the Present Day, c. i.; also Margerie, Philosophie Contemporaine, pp. 191-226.

of like metaphysical acumen have been found to proclaim the existence of the soul to be disproved, because anatomy has not revealed it, the "dissecting knife" having never yet laid it bare.

Writers of this stamp scarcely deserve serious refutation. To speak of thought as a "secretion" or "movement" of cerebral matter is to talk deliberate nonsense. Thought is essentially unextended. The idea of virtue, the judgment that two and two must equal four, the series of connected reasonings by which the Forty-Seventh Proposition of Euclid is established, the consenting act of the will, the emotion of admiration, are by their nature devoid of all spatial relations. The various secretive organs effect movements and material products. Their operations occupy space, and the resulting substance is possessed of resistance, weight, and other material properties. The process and the product can be apprehended by the external senses, and they continue to exist when unperceived. Conscious states are the exact reverse in all these points. The microscope has never detected them. They cannot be weighed, measured, or bottled. When not perceived they are non-existent; their only esse is percipi. Even Mr. Herbert Spencer is forced to admit the futility of attempting to reduce mental states to physical processes: "No effort enables us to assimilate them. That a feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring them into juxtaposition.' "13

3 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I. § 62. Dr. Tyndall admits the same truth in a frequently cited paragraph: "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiments of the organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from one to the other. They appear together, but we do not know why. Were our minds and senses so expanded as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain, were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings and electric discharges, if such there be, and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem

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(2) In a slightly less crude way consciousness is described as a function of the brain: "On sait que le sentir ne peut être considéré que comme une fonction du cerveau. "There is every reason to believe that consciousness is a function of nervous matter, when that matter has attained a certain degree of organization, just as we know the other actions to which the nervous system ministers, such as reflex action, and the like, to be."5 Thought is as much a function of matter as motion is." The use of the term "function," however, does not better the materialist's position with any reader not contented with payment in obscure words. What is a "function of matter"? The only "functions" of matter of which physical science is cognizant consist of movements or changes in matter. Now, thought, as we have just pointed out, is nothing of this sort. If we employ this word at all, we must speak of intellectual activity as a function of something utterly opposed in nature to all known subjects of material force. When mental processes are at work, movements indeed take place in the nervous substance of the cerebrum, and it is accordingly true that the brain "functions and expends energy whilst we think. But neither this functioning nor the energy expended constitutes thought. As Dr. Tyndall says, the "chasm" between the two classes of facts still remains "intellectually impassable."

(3) Dr. Büchner, by comparing the organism to the steam-engine, seeks to prove that mental life is merely the result of the complexity and variety of the material forces and properties at work in the former. "Thought,

How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?' The chasm between the two classes remains still intellectually impassable." (Address to the British Association at Norwich.) Professor Huxley has, in one of his better moments, endorsed this doctrine. (Cf. "Mr. Darwin and his Critics," Contemp. Rev. Nov. 1871.) But the passage tells equally against the "function view of the next objection, advocated at times by Mr. Huxley himself. 4 Broussais. Cf. Margerie, op. cit. p. 180. 5 Prof. Huxley, Contemp. Rev. Nov. 1871.

Realism Examined, p. 41.

Huxley, Macmillan's Magazine, May, 1870.

Cf. Herbert's Modern

spirit, soul, are not material, not a substance, but the effect of the conjoined action of many materials endowed with forces or qualities. . In the same manner as the steam-engine produces motion, so does the organic complication of force-endowed materials produce in the animal body effects so interwoven as to become a unit, which is then by us called spirit, soul, thought. The sum of these effects is nothing material; it can be perceived by our senses as little as any other simple force, such as magnetism, electricity, &c., merely by its manifestations."

This is a fair example of the random methods of reasoning employed by materialists. What is the resultant of the aggregate of forces accumulated in the steam-engine? It is nothing more nor less than movements of portions of matter, all perceptible by the external senses. If the engine drags a train, we may speak of the motion of the latter as being a single effect, but the occurrence has only a moral or metaphorical unity. It is really a series of events, a vast assemblage of parts of matter moving other parts. Now, when we turn to the living organism, we find, indeed, a similar set of movements and displacements of matter, but we find also in addition to these physical occurrences, and differing from them, as Mr. Spencer says, "by a difference transcending all other differences," the very phenomenon to be explained, "spirit, soul, thought." Granting, then, for the sake of argument, similarity between the material forces collected in the steam-engine and in the human body, at most the legitimate inference would be that the various movements and organic changes observable in the body were the outcome of its material energy; but there is not a shadow of a reason for attributing the distinctly new phenomenon of consciousness to that energy. In the final sentence another piece of confused and inconsistent thinking is introduced. Thought is there likened to the "simple forces, magnetism, electricity," &c. But the only known manifestations of

7 Kraft und Stoff (Trans.), pp. 135, 136. Cf. Herbert, op. cit. pp. 50-52.

electricity, magnetism, &c., consist in the production of movement. Consciousness, however, is revealed in a different way. Of the nature of electricity or magnetism as a simple force we know nothing. The word is merely an abstract term to denote the unknown cause of a certain species of movements coming under external observation. On the other hand, of mental states we have immediate internal experience, and that experience discloses conscious life as centred in one single being, in a peculiar indivisible unity utterly repugnant to the composite nature of a material subject.s

(4) Against the spirituality of the principle of thought, it was objected by Locke that matter has a great variety of wonderful and unlike properties, that our knowledge of these is still very limited, and, consequently, that we are not justified in asserting that matter could not be the subject of intellectual activity. Further, such a statement is derogatory of the Divine power, implying that God Himself could not endow matter with the faculty of thought. We most readily admit our knowledge of matter to be still very inadequate, and we allow that matter possesses many unlike qualities. But it is not from mere dissimilarity in character subsisting between mental and material phenomena-although this dissimilarity "transcends all other differences" that we infer a distinct principle. It is from the absolute contrariety in nature which sets them in opposition. In spite of the imperfect condition of our acquaintance with matter, we can affirm with absolute certainty that some new properties, e.g. selfmotion, can never be discovered in it. It is, too, no reflexion on the power of God to say that He cannot effect a metaphysical impossibility, such as the endowment of an extended substance with the indivisible spiritual activity of self-consciousness would be.

8 4 Fifty million molecules, even when they are highly complex and unstable phosphorized compounds, gyrating in the most wonderful fashion with inconceivable rapidity, certainly do not constitute one thing. They do not, then, by molecular constitution and activities, even constitute a physical basis which is conceivable as a representative or correlate of one thing." (Ladd, op. cit. p. 595.)