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II.]

Consciousness certainly not.

83

and senseless atoms would spring the whole universe, including ourselves, our hopes and loves and pains, our grand capacities for good or ill. If this were the verdict of science, then indeed we should be compelled to believe that she stands to all religion in the attitude of a deadly enemy-nay, of a conqueror who gives no quarter.

But, happily, we are driven to no such tremendous conclusion. For it is the clear and unanimous verdict, alike of modern science and philosophy, that there is not only no analogy, but no conceivable analogy, between the phenomena of dead matter, or even between the visible phenomena of living matter, and the phenomena of consciousness. We can see in the vital acts of an animal or a plant enough resemblance to the properties of inorganic structures, to say that perhaps there may be no essential difference between the phenomena of living matter and those of lifeless matter. But when we attempt to pass from the visible manifestations of life to feeling and thought, we find a gulf over which science has thrown and can throw no bridge. We are forced, each of us for himself, to conclude that this body with its functions and possibilities is not all: that there is something else, called mind, which is the seat of these higher activities, a something of which the body itself is but the clothing and the instrument. Thus in his own consciousness every man possesses an avenue leading out into the unseen, away from matter and the properties of matter, away from organisms and the functions of organisms, into a region where science is powerless to follow.

We have good reason to believe that every thought which passes through the mind is associated with some movement or physical action of the cells which build up the brain; and that if those cells were removed, the mysterious link which connects consciousness with the body would be broken, although certani vital functions might still be exercised. And it might seem

84

Mind, the first reality.

[LECT.

natural, to a superficial view, to conclude that thought and feeling are nothing but those physical actions, and that the mind is nothing but the brain. I am well aware that a too exclusive study of the material universe and a realization of the fact that perhaps all visible vital actions are purely physical, may tend to make a man rush to the conclusion that materialism is a true or at least a possible philosophy; to exclaim, everything is matter, or the affections of matter."

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when I come to examine the grounds of my knowledge of matter and the affections of matter, I find that the point from which I start-the postulate which I take without proof as the basis of my system-is none other than this: I am a conscious thinker. I know the universe only as it affects my consciousness. These things which I call matter and the motion of matter are no more than assumptions which I have made to account for certain of my states of consciousness; and a state of consciousness cannot exist without a thinking mind. To my own mind, then, I must ascribe a reality far greater than any reality I may choose to ascribe to the external universe. Indeed you could not contradict me if I were to say, with Berkeley, that the external universe has no reality at all—" its being is to be perceived or known." I do not say that; but if you will think how impregnable even that extreme position is, you will easily realize how absurd would be the statement that a state of consciousness is an affection of matter, when all we know of matter and its qualities is learnt by postulating consciousness first of all. In fact "if I were obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative." These last are not my words: they are the words of a deservedly honoured teacher of science, a great physiologist and a thorough-going apostle of evolution Professor Huxley, who has in the same place ex1 Critiques and Addresses, p. 314 and p. 293.

1

II.]

I am more than an organism.

85

pressed his conviction of the "great truth,” great truth," "that the honest and rigorous following up of the argument which leads us to materialism, inevitably carries us beyond it."

Obviously in all this we have no proof of a future life: what I contend is merely that science does not disprove it. What she teaches me is that I am more then a countless aggregate of molecules, more than a collection of cells, more than a highly organized individual unit of vitality. She teaches me that there is something which is more truly myself than any of these, and transcends them all.

That this something is connected by ties of closest union with the outward and visible part is certain: that it may not be capable of living on when those ties are broken we dare not say. And if we feel, as some have seemed to feel, the need for imagining an embodiment by which in the future life a memory of the past shall be preserved, a physical link between the future and the present, science is even able to suggest how such an embodiment may be supplied.1

My knowledge that I am a conscious being is a kind of knowledge which I can have with regard to myself alone. My knowledge of other men is entirely derived through physical channels, and cannot directly teach me that they too are conscious. But when I find an essential similarity between their visible characteristics and my own, it is a natural and proper step to conclude that they, like myself, are the habitations of conscious minds.. Here, however, the analogy stops. We recognise each other to be conscious without the smallest hesitation; but we cannot be certain that the lower animals are so we can scarcely deny consciousness to a dog or a horse; on the other hand, we have a great deal of difficulty in imagining the mind of an oyster or a mushroom; still more

1 See "The Unseen Universe," by Profs. Stewart and Tait.

86

Science and Immortality.

[LECT.

in conceiving of any higher attribute than vitality as the separate possession of the cells which build up any complex organism; while it takes an unusually bold speculator to fancy that a molecule thinks and feels. And so we have no scientific means of tracing the development of our invisible part in the same way we have traced the development of our bodies. We may speculate about cell souls, and a rudimentary consciousness inherent in matter, provided we do not fall into the error of calling our speculations science: and I am not aware that they will in any case have special interest to the Christian. For him it is enough that he has a soul-how evolved he does not know; his concern is with its character and its destiny. And he cares little whether in the after life he shall find other messengers from earth than the souls of his fellow men, and whether he shall inhabit a form whose parts are the projections into futurity of the dead vital fragments of which his earthly body was composed. In truth, the absence of all likeness between the spiritual and the bodily side of our nature precludes us from applying to the former the results of our study of the latter, and baffles all speculation which would trace continuity in the development of mind as we seek to trace it in the development of body. In his longing for a future, in which he may go on towards that perfection he sees to be so unattainable here, and yet so supremely worthy of attainment, man stands alone, apart from all the brutes; and it may well be that he, the only aspirant, is the only possessor; that his alone is the gift of eternal life.

The attitude of science towards the doctrine of the immortality of the soul has been admirably summed up by Clerk Maxwell in a single sentence:-"The progress of science," he says, "so far as we have been able to follow it, has added nothing of importance to what has always been known about the physical consequences of death, but has rather tended to deepen the distinction between the visible part, which perishes before our

II.]

Summary of results.

87

eyes, and that which we are ourselves, and to show that this personality, with respect to its nature as well as to its destiny, lies quite beyond the range of science."

1

We have now taken a brief but comprehensive glance over the field where evolution may with more or less distinctness be discerned in the physical world. And it only remains to indicate what I hope many of you have already seen for yourselves—that there is absolutely nothing in the idea of physical evolution, extend it as we please, to affect the fundamental articles of Christian belief. I have already pointed out that it leaves the question of the immortality of the soul exactly where that question was before evolution took to itself a name. It gives no clue whatever as to the purpose of the universe, and leaves us as free as we have always been to see in all events the expression of the Divine will. Let us take the extreme mechanical view, which an acceptance of the evolution theory in its most extended shape would lead us to take. Let us say that the whole physical world, including the living beings in it, is at any moment the necessary result of the position, motion, and physical properties possessed by the primitive atoms of which the cosmic mist was composed; then we have just as much need as ever of a First Cause to account for that initial arrangement; and the more clearly we recognise the sum of actual events as potentially contained in the primitive cosmic mist, the more, surely may we assert that everything happens of set purpose. I am glad in this connection to be able to quote Professor Huxley, who, in criticising Haeckel, has remarked that "the teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the

1Nature, Vol. XIX, p. 143

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