or refusing to account for his own personality and his power to question heaven and earth, he purposely excludes God and the human soul from any place in the universe, and multiplies words only to persuade us that nature is an endless consequence without a cause, having a destiny without design, and governed by laws without a will that may revoke them, or a wisdom that enacted them. A possibility of change for higher purposes towards perpetuated beings is a conception beyond such philosophers. The cant of false philosophers is deeper than the cant of common hypocrites. They pretend to bow to materialistic destiny-should this exist-forgetting that, if it do, they can never know. They are so extremely impartial, so sublimely self-denying, as to assume their own value as equal to zero, and of less significance than a grain of sand in the universe.* Truly, the way of such proud prostration is equally hard and hardening. * Reich in Anthrop. Rev. No. 13, p. 135. 133 CHAPTER XI. MAN NOT ANATOMIC. As Science affords us no help in our endeavours to account for the original derivation of man's body, so neither does it approach to an explanation of the existence of man's mind. We can only say that the human soul, by manifesting mind, asserts its own attributes as not due to physical formation, and that reason demands our belief in the fact that both body and soul stand connected in a direct line with the first human pair, who could have no parentage but in the will of the All-father. Our arguments in relation to the especial endowments of man's body will be strengthened and sustained as we proceed to consider the prerogatives of man himself, the soul, the ipse ego, the individual, the being who is self-conscious, and consists not of dissoluble parts. The nature, attributes, and requirements of the man himself are not matters of bone and brain, but are altogether out of the reach of the anatomist and the chemist. The question, Is there such an entity as a soul, a whole being in itself, a man not one with the human body? is too absurd to deserve reply. It assumes as possible what is impossible, namely, that he who puts the question may be the same being as the body he uses; which is but saying that two things may be the same thing. Either the body is the man or not. If he is the same as his body, why does he call the body mine and not me? True, we also say my mind, my soul, my spirit, because in thinking and speaking of anything we must conceive an object out of ourselves; so that the ego itself, when thought of, is thought of through its qualities, and thus, so to say, separated and conditioned by the act of thinking. But who, therefore, does not still feel that the thinking being differs in toto from any other thing? We cannot but know that ourselves, as conscious agents, are individuals apart from the ideas or perceptions of which we are conscious. It is a matter of consciousness, and every man is conscious that his body is not himself. If the body be the man, when the body dies he dies, but if not, then when the body perishes, or returns to its elements as we know it does, the man, as another entity, must be somewhere out of the body that died. The materials of the body itself are imperishable, and shall we think otherwise of that which thinks? Men of the highest scientific attainment are very properly engaged, to the best of their ability, in endeavouring to discover the right answer to the great question, What is man's place in nature? If the word 'nature' be so restricted in its application to man as to signify only what relates to his bodily organs and their functions, we need not proceed with our enquiry, since the anatomist and chemist long ago decided the question by merely reducing man's framework to its elements, and placing his skeleton in the museum at the head of all the animals. Will the chemist De content to define his idea of himself as merely a differentiation of carbonate of ammonia with water? Or will the anatomist satisfy himself by classifying himself as Primate No. 1,' in virtue of the arrangement of his bones, with their appendages of muscles, vessels, and viscera? The real question is this: Has either the anatomist or chemist anything to do with man himself? We at once reply, No. Man is a living soul, not a dead body. He is a being that cannot leave a relic or a trace of himself in his corpse, or his caput mortuum. Whatever connection might once have existed between that wonderful organism and the spirit that energised it, there is no connection now; the man is gone. The body was his local habitation and medium of action as long as he lived in it, and so far his place in nature was evident enough. He was in a body, vastly superior, indeed, in its finish and fitness for mind to that of any other known animal, but still built up of common materials on the ordinary physical principles, that, as a creature of this earth, he might use his senses and his limbs in learning the qualities of things with pain and pleasure. It requires no especial elaboration of anatomical analysis to convince us that as to bodily adaptation to a physical world—where life must be kept up with the help of heart, lungs, and stomach, with limbs in relation to their necessities, as well as to reason and to the five avenues of sense-man's place is that of head and archon of this earthly creation. His place in this respect was never disputed; he asserts his prerogative by the superior powers he possesses, not, however, so much in the body as the mind. He stands by his reason so far above animals that his actual relationship by birth and derivation to brutes was never suspected until these days. And now, if hypothetical speculation as to the origin of man's body had not of late been so ingeniously busy with presumed analogies as to confound all essential distinctions between what is animal and what is human, there would have been no occasion to review our reasons for believing in especial creations, which determined from the first formation of man his proper and peculiar place among them. * Instead of discoursing concerning man's place in nature, which nature may mean everything occurring as if under 'the unchangeable laws of an endless cycle,' it will be more consistent with the purpose of this volume to assume something definite as the basis on which to build the intended argument. It was, indeed, necessary to assume, as granted, that all things are created; but can it be necessary to justify that assumption? Science, as well as common sense-the common consciousness of the rational mind-assents to the assertion that this world had a beginning in an act of will, which produced substance, being matter and mind, not previously existing, except as thoughts, so to speak, of *Neander, vol. i. p. 9. |