passable distinction between Man and the whole animal creation. "In the living beings of former ages," writes Professor Dana, “there had been intelligence and a low grade of reason -affections as between the dam and her cub, and the joyousness of life and activity in the sporting tribes of the land. But there had been no living soul that could look beyond time into eternity, from the finite toward the infinite, from the world around to the world within and God above. This was the new creation-as new as when life began; a spiritual element as diverse from the life of the brute as life itself is diverse from inorganic existence." And this new life was typified, as we have seen, in the cephalized structure of Man,* who from the first appeared as a creature formed in all his parts for the service of his brain, and thus for rational dominion over inorganic matter and mere physical life; a creature who, "endued With sanctity of reason, might erect His stature, and upright, with front serene Govern the rest, self-knowing; and from thence Man has been defined as an Intelligence served by organs; and his reasoning intelligence is a characteristic that separates him from the brute creation by a chasm that they can never cross. The contrast is most striking when the human mind is directed to a point where the instinct of an animal is exhibited in the highest perfection. Only by the refined and severe method of the calculus was it ascertained that to secure the most room and strength upon a given space, with the least waste of material, the builder must adopt the exact angles which the bee forms by instinct. But how much * Cuvier's great discovery, which Prof. Owen styles the "law of the subordination of the different organic characters to the condition of the whole animal," finds its highest example in the subordination of Man's body to his brain. INSTINCT NOT A REASONING INTELLIGENCE. 69 greater the mind of Newton that grasped the principles, and defined the laws, and gave the rules of calculation, than the instinct of the bee in doing its work! How much greater the mind of Michel Angelo shaping St. Peter's to his thought, and then crystallizing the conception into stone, than the instinct of the bee building its cell! Whence came the mind of Newton, the mind of Michel Angelo? Was this developed upward from the instinct of the bee? or was it a created intelligence, the offspring of God? And what shall we say of this MIND of Man ?-its power of reasoning, which grasps the facts of the external world and the truths of the inner world of consciousness, and weaves them into consecutive chains of ideas, and builds up fabrics of thought that will stand though the physical universe shall fall?-the Mind which hides itself within its net-work of nerve and sinew and muscle, like an invisible spider, alive to the least touch or approach from without, quick to seize upon and appropriate as its food whatever comes within its range, throwing out new filaments to bind each floating atom of the real world, and then spinning from its mysterious depths a new world of thought and imagination, of ethereal texture and prismatic beauty, itself the living center of the whole? What shall we say of this Mind that, from a few arbitrary characters and a few articulate sounds, constructs a language that expresses thought, that stirs emotion, that kindles passions or allays them-language that makes the printed page glow with the fire and beauty of poetry, that makes the air pulsate with the throbs of eloquence ?—this Mind that from a few arbitrary figures, that you may count upon your fingers, constructs the abstract science of mathematics, by which it weighs the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance; by which it measures the velocity of light and the distances and magnitudes of the stars ?-this Mind of Man that, with unfaltering confidence, determines by mathematical law that the equilibrium of our solar system demands the existence of another planet yet unseen, then points the telescope and finds it where it ought to be?-this Mind that takes the wings of the morning and out-travels light; that flies backward to the beginning and forward to the unknown; that counts all time. and space its home, and dares look forth upon the Infinite? From a few letters of the alphabet Homer made a poem whose rhythm still beats upon the shores of Time, while the sea washes a desolate beach where Troy once stood; Plato gave shape to thoughts that live, while Athens is falling to decay; the creations of mind survive, though temples and pyramids perish; and though the heavens should pass away, and the stars be seen no more, the system of mathematical order and beauty that Newton formed from a few abstract lines and numbers, would remain for the admiring contemplation of the Mind, overarching it with a firmament of its own. This Mind of Man, with its powers of Reason, Imagination, Memory, Will, with its hopes and fears, its joys and loves,this Mind that knows itself, and that dominates all matter and all life without itself,-can it be less than the immediate offspring of God? If Man be over Nature as a power, is not God more than Nature, more than law, more than fate? Is not Man himself a proof of the supernatural? Man, whose physical origin can not be traced to any evolution of natural law, whose rudest beginnings of life were an assertion of his dominion over Nature, whose functions as an Intelligence ally him to the realm of spiritual powers, is separated yet more decisively from the control of Nature in the sphere of Consciousness. That is an untenable and absurd monopoly of the term science that would restrict it to physical phenomena, and would treat of these as the only realities in the universe. Indeed, we can have no certainty concerning CONSCIOUSNESS A GROUND OF CERTAINTY. 71 that which is without, save upon the assumed certainty of that which is within. All knowledge from the widest circle comes back at last to the knowing subject as its pivot; and the physicist who reposes all his faith upon Nature, would have the unscientific layman receive Nature itself upon faith in his observation and veracity-in other words, faith in himself as an intelligence. Now, this selfhood is the essence of the Man, the conscious person, the Ego, who knows himself, and knows that he knows; and within himself there is a domain of science, of nobler phenomena, and of no less certain determinations, than the physical universe. "When I was young, Cebes," says Socrates, in the Phædo, "it is surprising how earnestly I desired that species of science which they call physical. For it appeared to me pre-eminently excellent in bringing us to know the causes of each, through what each is produced and destroyed, and exists. But happening to hear some one read in a book, which he said was of Anaxagoras, that it is Intelligence which is the parent of order, and cause of all things, I was pleased with this cause, and it seemed to me to be well that Intelligence was the cause of all, and I considered that, were it so, the ordering Intelligence ordered all things, and placed each thing there where it was best." The science that deals with Intelligence as its subject is of a higher order than that which deals with physical phenomena and their laws. The science of Mind is higher than the science of matter, and the science of Morals is higher than either, in the nature of its subject and the grandeur of its results. Nor can we concede to physicists that theirs is peculiarly the science of certainties. Personality and free-will, given in consciousness, are as certain as are the mountains. Right and wrong, truth, justice, moral law, are as certain as are any facts in the physical world. When, therefore, Dr. Draper or Herbert Spencer would persuade me that I am shaped and governed as an atom by purely physical causes, I assert my conscious personality and free-will. If he seeks to contravene these by physical laws, I still assert them, and defy him to set them aside. For if the Ego does not exist as a conscious subject, the perception of the non-Ego, which is Nature, is an impossibility; or, as Hamilton expresses it, "once Consciousness is ruined as an instrument, Philosophy is extinct." The materialist insists that I shall believe only that which can be tested by the evidence of the senses, and reduces the operations of mind itself to manifestations of the physical organization with which it is connected. But in recording observations and making experiments that extend over a considerable period of time, he assumes his own identity through memory and consciousness-his personal existence. as an intelligent observer-and he demands of me that I shall accept the results of his observations upon faith in his intelligence, his competence, his accuracy, his fidelity;—in a word, he demands of me faith in human testimony concerning that which in theory he holds should be accepted only upon the strictest scientific evidence. Now the certainty of the facts of consciousness which the materialist tacitly assumes, while he rejects them in theory, may be no less conclusive and absolute than the certainty of physical facts observed by the senses. I know that I am, that I think, that I will, that I am free. I know that there is a Right, a Justice, a moral Law. I accept whatever facts the materialist brings me from his varied and profound researches in the domain of physics; but when he seeks to bind me with these as with chains, I say to him, There are other facts also, as certain as yours, and nobler, grander far than yours; these I know, and these |