Chapter I: Preliminary (3)

Thomasius, however, in his Christi Person und Werk, 1:164-168,
quotes from Luther the following statement, which is clearly
dichotomous: “The first part, the spirit, is the highest, deepest,
noblest part of man. By it he is fitted to comprehend eternal
things, and it is, in short, the house in which dwell faith and
the word of God. The other, the soul, is this same spirit,
according to nature, but yet in another sort of activity, namely,
in this, that it animates the body and works through it; and it is
its method not to grasp things incomprehensible, but only what
reason can search out, know, and measure.” Thomasius himself says:
“Trichotomy, I hold with Meyer, is not Scripturally sustained.”
Neander, sometimes spoken of as a trichotomist, says that spirit
is soul in its elevated and normal relation to God and divine
things; ψυχή is that same soul in its relation to the sensuous and
perhaps sinful things of this world. Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T.,
32—“Spirit = the breath of God, considered as independent of the
body; soul = that same breath, in so far as it gives life to the
body.”

The doctrine we have advocated, moreover, in contrast with the
heathen view, puts honor upon man’s body, as proceeding from the
hand of God and as therefore originally pure (_Gen. 1:31_—“_And
God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very
good_”); as intended to be the dwelling place of the divine Spirit
(_1 Cor. 6:19_—“_know ye not that your body is a temple of the
Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?_”); and as
containing the germ of the heavenly body (_1 Cor. 15:44_—“_it is
sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body_”; _Rom.
8:11_—“_shall give life also to your mortal bodies through his
Spirit that dwelleth in you_”—here many ancient authorities read
“_because of his Spirit that dwelleth in you_”—διά τὸ ἐνοικοῦν
αὐτοῦ πνεῦμα). Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief, suggests that
man, unlike angels, may have been provided with a fleshly body,
(1) to objectify sin, and (2) to enable Christ to unite himself to
the race, in order to save it.

IV. Origin of the Soul.

Three theories with regard to this subject have divided opinion:

1. The Theory of Preëxistence.

This view was held by Plato, Philo, and Origen; by the first, in order to explain the soul’s possession of ideas not derived from sense; by the second, to account for its imprisonment in the body; by the third, to justify the disparity of conditions in which men enter the world. We concern ourselves, however, only with the forms which the view has assumed in modern times. Kant and Julius Müller in Germany, and Edward Beecher in America, have advocated it, upon the ground that the inborn depravity of the human will can be explained only by supposing a personal act of self-determination in a previous, or timeless, state of being.

The truth at the basis of the theory of preëxistence is simply the
ideal existence of the soul, before birth, in the mind of God—that
is, God’s foreknowledge of it. The intuitive ideas of which the
soul finds itself in possession, such as space, time, cause,
substance, right, God, are evolved from itself; in other words,
man is so constituted that he perceives these truths upon proper
occasions or conditions. The apparent recollection that we have
seen at some past time a landscape which we know to be now for the
first time before us, is an illusory putting together of
fragmentary concepts or a mistaking of a part for the whole; we
have seen something like a part of the landscape,—we fancy that we
have seen this landscape, and the whole of it. Our recollection of
a past event or scene is one whole, but this one idea may have an
indefinite number of subordinate ideas existing within it. The
sight of something which is similar to one of these parts suggests
the past whole. Coleridge: “The great law of the imagination that
likeness in part tends to become likeness of the whole.” Augustine
hinted that this illusion of memory may have played an important
part in developing the belief in metempsychosis.

Other explanations are those of William James, in his Psychology:
The brain tracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in
its recall, are different; Baldwin, Psychology, 263, 264: We may
remember what we have seen in a dream, or there may be a revival
of ancestral or race experiences. Still others suggest that the
two hemispheres of the brain act asynchronously;
self-consciousness or apperception is distinguished from
perception; divorce, from fatigue, of the processes of sensation
and perception, causes paramnesia. Sully, Illusions, 280, speaks
of an organic or atavistic memory: “May it not happen that by the
law of hereditary transmission ... ancient experiences will now
and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise
to apparently personal recollections?” Letson, The Crowd, believes
that the mob is atavistic and that it bases its action upon
inherited impulses: “The inherited reflexes are atavistic
memories” (quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 204).

Plato held that intuitive ideas are reminiscences of things
learned in a previous state of being; he regarded the body as the
grave of the soul; and urged the fact that the soul had knowledge
before it entered the body, as proof that the soul would have
knowledge after it left the body, that is, would be immortal. See
Plato, Meno, 82-85, Phædo, 72-75, Phædrus, 245-250, Republic,
5:460 and 10:614. Alexander, Theories of the Will, 36, 37—“Plato
represents preëxistent souls as having set before them a choice of
virtue. The choice is free, but it will determine the destiny of
each soul. Not God, but he who chooses, is responsible for his
choice. After making their choice, the souls go to the fates, who
spin the threads of their destiny, and it is thenceforth
irreversible. As Christian theology teaches that man was free but
lost his freedom by the fall of Adam, so Plato affirms that the
preëxistent soul is free until it has chosen its lot in life.” See
Introductions to the above mentioned works of Plato in Jowett’s
translation. Philo held that all souls are emanations from God,
and that those who allowed themselves, unlike the angels, to be
attracted by matter, are punished for this fall by imprisonment in
the body, which corrupts them, and from which they must break
loose. See Philo, De Gigantibus, Pfeiffer’s ed., 2:360-364. Origen
accounted for disparity of conditions at birth by the differences
in the conduct of these same souls in a previous state. God’s
justice at the first made all souls equal; condition here
corresponds to the degree of previous guilt; _Mat. 20:3_—“_others
standing in the market place idle_” = souls not yet brought into
the world. The Talmudists regarded all souls as created at once in
the beginning, and as kept like grains of corn in God’s granary,
until the time should come for joining each to its appointed body.
See Origen, De Anima, 7; περὶ ἀρχῶν, ii:9:6; _cf._ i:1:2, 4, 18;
4:36. Origen’s view was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople,
538. Many of the preceding facts and references are taken from
Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733.

For modern advocates of the theory, see Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason, sec. 15; Religion in. d. Grenzen d. bl. Vernunft, 26, 27;
Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:357-401; Edward Beecher,
Conflict of Ages. The idea of preëxistence has appeared to a
notable extent in modern poetry. See Vaughan, The Retreate (1621);
Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood;
Tennyson, Two Voices, stanzas 105-119, and Early Sonnets, 25—“As
when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, And ebb into a former
life, or seem To lapse far back in some confused dream To states
of mystical similitude; If one but speaks or hems or stirs his
chair, Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, So that we say ‘All
this hath been before, All this hath been, I know not when or
where.’ So, friend, when first I looked upon your face, Our
thought gave answer each to each, so true—Opposed mirrors each
reflecting each—That though I knew not in what time or place,
Methought that I had often met with you, And either lived in
either’s heart and speech.” Robert Browning, La Saisiaz, and
Christina: “Ages past the soul existed; Here an age ’tis resting
merely, And hence fleets again for ages.” Rossetti, House of Life:
“I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell; I know
the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing
sound, the lights along the shore. You have been mine before, How
long ago I may not know; But just when, at that swallow’s soar,
Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall—I knew it all of yore”;
quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 103-106, who holds the phenomenon due
to false induction and interpretation.

Briggs, School, College and Character, 95—“Some of us remember the
days when we were on earth for the first time;”—which reminds us
of the boy who remembered sitting in a corner before he was born
and crying for fear he would be a girl. A more notable
illustration is that found in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by
Lockhart, his son-in-law, 8:274—“Yesterday, at dinner time, I was
strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of
preëxistence—viz., a confused idea that nothing that passed was
said for the first time—that the same topics had been discussed
and the same persons had started the same opinions on them. It is
true there might have been some ground for recollections,
considering that three at least of the company were old friends
and had kept much company together.... But the sensation was so
strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the desert, or a
calenture on board of ship, when lakes are seen in the desert and
sylvan landscapes in the sea. It was very distressing yesterday
and brought to mind the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal
world. There was a vile sense of want of reality in all I did and
said.... I drank several glasses of wine, but these only
aggravated the disorder. I did not find the _in vino veritas_ of
the philosophers.”

To the theory of preëxistence we urge the following objections:

(_a_) It is not only wholly without support from Scripture, but it directly contradicts the Mosaic account of man’s creation in the image of God, and Paul’s description of all evil and death in the human race as the result of Adam’s sin.

_Gen. 1:27_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the image
of God created he him_”; _31_—“_And God saw every thing that he
had made, and, behold, it was very good._” _Rom.
5:12_—“_Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world,
and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that
all sinned._” The theory of preëxistence would still leave it
doubtful whether all men are sinners, or whether God assembles
only sinners upon the earth.

(_b_) If the soul in this preëxistent state was conscious and personal, it is inexplicable that we should have no remembrance of such preëxistence, and of so important a decision in that previous condition of being;—if the soul was yet unconscious and impersonal, the theory fails to show how a moral act involving consequences so vast could have been performed at all.

Christ remembered his preëxistent state; why should not we? There
is every reason to believe that in the future state we shall
remember our present existence; why should we not now remember the
past state from which we came? It may be objected that
Augustinians hold to a sin of the race in Adam—a sin which none of
Adam’s descendants can remember. But we reply that no Augustinian
holds to a personal existence of each member of the race in Adam,
and therefore no Augustinian needs to account for lack of memory
of Adam’s sin. The advocate of preëxistence, however, does hold to
a personal existence of each soul in a previous state, and
therefore needs to account for our lack of memory of it.

(_c_) The view sheds no light either upon the origin of sin, or upon God’s justice in dealing with it, since it throws back the first transgression to a state of being in which there was no flesh to tempt, and then represents God as putting the fallen into sensuous conditions in the highest degree unfavorable to their restoration.

This theory only increases the difficulty of explaining the origin
of sin, by pushing back its beginning to a state of which we know
less than we do of the present. To say that the soul in that
previous state was only potentially conscious and personal, is to
deny any real probation, and to throw the blame of sin on God the
Creator. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:228—“In modern times,
the philosophers Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer have explained
the bad from an intelligible act of freedom, which (according to
Schelling and Schopenhauer) also at the same time effectuates the
temporal existence and condition of the individual soul. But what
are we to think of as meant by such a mystical deed or act through
which the subject of it first comes into existence? Is it not
this, that perhaps under this singular disguise there is concealed
the simple thought that the origin of the bad lies not so much in
a _doing_ of the individual freedom as rather in the _rise_ of
it,—that is to say, in the process of development through which
the natural man becomes a moral man, and the merely potentially
rational man becomes an actually rational man?”

(_d_) While this theory accounts for inborn spiritual sin, such as pride and enmity to God, it gives no explanation of inherited sensual sin, which it holds to have come from Adam, and the guilt of which must logically be denied.

While certain forms of the preëxistence theory are exposed to the
last objection indicated in the text, Julius Müller claims that
his own view escapes it; see Doctrine of Sin, 2:393. His theory,
he says, “would contradict holy Scripture if it derived inborn
sinfulness _solely_ from this extra-temporal act of the
individual, without recognizing in this sinfulness the element of
hereditary depravity in the sphere of the natural life, and its
connection with the sin of our first parents.” Müller, whose
trichotomy here determines his whole subsequent scheme, holds only
the πνεῦμα to have thus fallen in a preëxistent state. The ψυχή
comes, with the body, from Adam. The tempter only brought man’s
latent perversity of will into open transgression. Sinfulness, as
hereditary, does not involve guilt, but the hereditary principle
is the “medium through which the transcendent self-perversion of
the spiritual nature of man is transmitted to his whole temporal
mode of being.” While man is born guilty as to his πνεῦμα, for the
reason that this πνεῦμα sinned in a preëxistent state, he is also
born guilty as to his ψυχή, because this was one with the first
man in his transgression.

Even upon the most favorable statement of Müller’s view, we fail
to see how it can consist with the organic unity of the race; for
in that which chiefly constitutes us men—the πνεῦμα—we are as
distinct and separate creations as are the angels. We also fail to
see how, upon this view, Christ can be said to take our nature;
or, if he takes it, how it can be without sin. See Ernesti,
Ursprung der Sünde, 2:1-247; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele,
11-17: Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:92-122; Bruch, Lehre der
Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733. Also Bib. Sac.,
11:186-191; 12:156; 17:419-427; 20:447; Kahnis, Dogmatik,
3:250—“This doctrine is inconsistent with the indisputable fact
that the souls of children are like those of the parents; and it
ignores the connection of the individual with the race.”

2. The Creatian Theory.

This view was held by Aristotle, Jerome, and Pelagius, and in modern times has been advocated by most of the Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians. It regards the soul of each human being as immediately created by God and joined to the body either at conception, at birth, or at some time between these two. The advocates of the theory urge in its favor certain texts of Scripture, referring to God as the Creator of the human spirit, together with the fact that there is a marked individuality in the child, which cannot be explained as a mere reproduction of the qualities existing in the parents.

Creatianism, as ordinarily held, regards only the body as
propagated from past generations. Creatianists who hold to
trichotomy would say, however, that the animal soul, the ψυχή, is
propagated with the body, while the highest part of man, the
πνεῦμα, is in each case a direct creation of God,—the πνεῦμα not
being created, as the advocates of preëxistence believe, ages
before the body, but rather at the time that the body assumes its
distinct individuality.

Aristotle (De Anima) first gives definite expression to this view.
Jerome speaks of God as “making souls daily.” The scholastics
followed Aristotle, and through the influence of the Reformed
church, creatianism has been the prevailing opinion for the last
two hundred years. Among its best representatives are Turretin,
Inst., 5:13 (vol. 1:425); Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:65-76; Martensen,
Dogmatics, 141-148; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 99-106. Certain
Reformed theologians have defined very exactly God’s method of
creation. Polanus (5:31:1) says that God breathes the soul into
boys, forty days, and into girls, eighty days, after conception.
Göschel (in Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Seele) holds that while
dichotomy leads to traducianism, trichotomy allies itself to that
form of creatianism which regards the πνεῦμα as a direct creation
of God, but the ψυχή as propagated with the body. To the latter
answers the family name; to the former the Christian name. Shall
we count George Macdonald as a believer in Preëxistence or in
Creatianism, when he writes in his Baby’s Catechism: “Where did
you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into here. Where
did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky, as I came through.
Where did you get that little tear? I found it waiting when I got
here. Where did you get that pearly ear? God spoke, and it came
out to hear. How did they all just come to be you? God thought
about me, and so I grew.”

Creatianism is untenable for the following reasons:

(_a_) The passages adduced in its support may with equal propriety be regarded as expressing God’s mediate agency in the origination of human souls; while the general tenor of Scripture, as well as its representations of God as the author of man’s body, favor this latter interpretation.

Passages commonly relied upon by creatianists are the following:
_Eccl. 12:7_—“_the spirit returneth unto God who gave it_”; _Is.
57:16_—“_the souls that I have made_”; _Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah ...
who formeth the spirit of man within him_”; _Heb. 12:9_—“_the
Father of spirits._” But God is with equal clearness declared to
be the former of man’s body: see _Ps. 139:13, 14_—“_thou didst
form my inward parts: Thou didst cover me_ [marg. “_knit me
together_”] _in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks unto thee;
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Wonderful are thy
works_”; _Jer. 1:5_—“_I formed thee in the belly._” Yet we do not
hesitate to interpret these latter passages as expressive of
mediate, not immediate, creatorship,—God works through natural
laws of generation and development so far as the production of
man’s body is concerned. None of the passages first mentioned
forbid us to suppose that he works through these same natural laws
in the production of the soul. The truth in creatianism is the
presence and operation of God in all natural processes. A
transcendent God manifests himself in all physical begetting.
Shakespeare: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew
them how we will.” Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 112—“Creatianism, which
emphasizes the divine origin of man, is entirely compatible with
Traducianism, which emphasizes the mediation of natural agencies.
So for the race as a whole, its origin in a creative activity of
God is quite consistent with its being a product of natural
evolution.”

(_b_) Creatianism regards the earthly father as begetting only the body of his child—certainly as not the father of the child’s highest part. This makes the beast to possess nobler powers of propagation than man; for the beast multiplies himself after his own image.

The new physiology properly views soul, not as something added
from without, but as the animating principle of the body from the
beginning and as having a determining influence upon its whole
development. That children are like their parents, in intellectual
and spiritual as well as in physical respects, is a fact of which
the creatian theory gives no proper explanation. Mason, Faith of
the Gospel, 115—“The love of parents to children and of children
to parents protests against the doctrine that only the body is
propagated.” Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith, 207,—quoted in
Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:876—“Instead of the physical derivation
of the soul, we stand for the spiritual derivation of the body.”
We would amend this statement by saying that we stand for the
spiritual derivation of both soul and body, natural law being only
the operation of spirit, human and divine.

(_c_) The individuality of the child, even in the most extreme cases, as in the sudden rise from obscure families and surroundings of marked men like Luther, may be better explained by supposing a law of variation impressed upon the species at its beginning—a law whose operation is foreseen and supervised by God.

The differences of the child from the parent are often
exaggerated; men are generally more the product of their ancestry
and of their time than we are accustomed to think. Dickens made
angelic children to be born of depraved parents, and to grow up in
the slums. But this writing belongs to a past generation, when the
facts of heredity were unrecognized. George Eliot’s school is
nearer the truth; although she exaggerates the doctrine of
heredity in turn, until all idea of free will and all hope of
escaping our fate vanish. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 78,
90—“Separate motives, handed down from generation to generation,
sometimes remaining latent for great periods, to become suddenly
manifested under conditions the nature of which is not
discernible.... Conflict of inheritances [from different
ancestors] may lead to the institution of variety.”

Sometimes, in spite of George Eliot, a lily grows out of a
stagnant pool—how shall we explain the fact? We must remember that
the paternal and the maternal elements are themselves unlike; the
union of the two may well produce a third in some respects unlike
either; as, when two chemical elements unite, the product differs
from either of the constituents. We must remember also that
_nature_ is one factor; _nurture_ is another; and that the latter
is often as potent as the former (see Galton, Inquiries into Human
Faculty, 77-81). Environment determines to a large extent both the
fact and the degree of development. Genius is often another name
for Providence. Yet before all and beyond all we must recognize a
manifold wisdom of God, which in the very organization of species
impresses upon it a law of variation, so that at proper times and
under proper conditions the old is modified in the line of
progress and advance to something higher. Dante, Purgatory, canto
vii—“Rarely into the branches of the tree Doth human worth mount
up; and so ordains He that bestows it, that as his free gift It
may be called.” Pompilia, the noblest character in Robert
Browning’s Ring and the Book, came of “a bad lot.” Geo. A. Gordon,
Christ of To-day, 123-126—“It is mockery to account for Abraham
Lincoln and Robert Burns and William Shakespeare upon naked
principles of heredity and environment.... All intelligence and
all high character are transcendent, and have their source in the
mind and heart of God. It is in the range of Christ’s
transcendence of his earthly conditions that we note the complete
uniqueness of his person.”

(_d_) This theory, if it allows that the soul is originally possessed of depraved tendencies, makes God the direct author of moral evil; if it holds the soul to have been created pure, it makes God indirectly the author of moral evil, by teaching that he puts this pure soul into a body which will inevitably corrupt it.

The decisive argument against creatianism is this one, that it
makes God the author of moral evil. See Kahnis, Dogmatik,
3:250—“Creatianism rests upon a justly antiquated dualism between
soul and body, and is irreconcilable with the sinful condition of
the human soul. The truth in the doctrine is just this only, that
generation can bring forth an immortal human life only according
to the power imparted by God’s word, and with the special
coöperation of God himself.” The difficulty of supposing that God
immediately creates a pure soul, only to put it into a body that
will infallibly corrupt it—“sicut vinum in vase acetoso”—has led
many of the most thoughtful Reformed theologians to modify the
creatian doctrine by combining it with traducianism.

Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:249-251, holds to creatianism in a wider
sense—a union of the paternal and maternal elements under the
express and determining efficiency of God. Ebrard, Dogmatik,
1:327-332, regards the soul as new-created, yet by a process of
mediate creation according to law, which he calls “metaphysical
generation.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:56, says that the
individual is not simply a manifestation of the species; God
applies to the origination of every single man a special creative
thought and act of will; yet he does this through the species, so
that it is creation by law,—else the child would be, not a
continuation of the old species, but the establishment of a new
one. So in speaking of the human soul of Christ, Dorner says
(3:340-349) that the soul itself does not owe its origin to Mary
nor to the species, but to the creative act of God. This soul
appropriates to itself from Mary’s body the elements of a human
form, purifying them in the process so far as is consistent with
the beginning of a life yet subject to development and human
weakness.

Bowne, Metaphysics, 500—“The laws of heredity must be viewed
simply as descriptions of a fact and never as its explanation. Not
as if ancestors passed on something to posterity, but solely
because of the inner consistency of the divine action” are
children like their parents. We cannot regard either of these
mediating views as self-consistent or intelligible. We pass on
therefore to consider the traducian theory which we believe more
fully to meet the requirements of Scripture and of reason. For
further discussion of creatianism, see Frohschammer, Ursprung der
Seele, 18-58; Alger, Doctrine of a Future Life, 1-17.

3. The Traducian Theory.

This view was propounded by Tertullian, and was implicitly held by Augustine. In modern times it has been the prevailing opinion of the Lutheran Church. It holds that the human race was immediately created in Adam, and, as respects both body and soul, was propagated from him by natural generation—all souls since Adam being only mediately created by God, as the upholder of the laws of propagation which were originally established by him.

Tertullian, De Anima: “Tradux peccati, tradux animæ.” Gregory of
Nyssa: “Man being one, consisting of soul and body, the common
beginning of his constitution must be supposed also one; so that
he may not be both older and younger than himself—that in him
which is bodily being first, and the other coming after” (quoted
in Crippen, Hist. of Christ. Doct., 80). Augustine, De Pec. Mer.
et Rem., 3:7—“In Adam all sinned, at the time when in his nature
all were still that one man”; De Civ. Dei, 13:14—“For we all were
in that one man, when we all were that one man.... The form in
which we each should live was not as yet individually created and
distributed to us, but there already existed the seminal nature
from which we were propagated.”

Augustine, indeed, wavered in his statements with regard to the
origin of the soul, apparently fearing that an explicit and
pronounced traducianism might involve materialistic consequences;
yet, as logically lying at the basis of his doctrine of original
sin, traducianism came to be the ruling view of the Lutheran
reformers. In his Table Talk, Luther says: “The reproduction of
mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the
matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of
the species by fashioning them out of clay, in the way Adam was
fashioned; as I should have counseled him also to let the sun
remain always suspended over the earth, like a great lamp,
maintaining perpetual light and heat.”

Traducianism holds that man, as a species, was created in Adam. In
Adam, the substance of humanity was yet undistributed. We derive
our immaterial as well as our material being, by natural laws of
propagation, from Adam,—each individual man after Adam possessing
a part of the substance that was originated in him. Sexual
reproduction has for its purpose the keeping of variations within
limit. Every marriage tends to bring back the individual type to
that of the species. The offspring represents not one of the
parents but both. And, as each of these parents represents two
grandparents, the offspring really represents the whole race.
Without this conjugation the individual peculiarities would
reproduce themselves in divergent lines like the shot from a
shot-gun. Fission needs to be supplemented by conjugation. The use
of sexual reproduction is to preserve the average individual in
the face of a progressive tendency to variation. In asexual
reproduction the offspring start on deviating lines and never mix
their qualities with those of their mates. Sexual reproduction
makes the individual the type of the species and gives solidarity
to the race. See Maupas, quoted by Newman Smith, Place of Death in
Evolution, 19-22.

John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is a Traducian. He has no
faith in the notion of a soul separate from and inhabiting the
body. He believes in a certain corporeity of the soul. Mind and
thought are rooted in the bodily organism. Soul was not inbreathed
after the body was formed. The breathing of God into man’s
nostrils was only the quickening impulse to that which already had
life. God does not create souls every day. Man is a body-and-soul,
or a soul-body, and he transmits himself as such. Harris, Moral
Evolution, 171—The individual man has a great number of ancestors
as well as a great number of descendants. He is the central point
of an hour-glass, or a strait between two seas which widen out
behind and before. How then shall we escape the conclusion that
the human race was most numerous at the beginning? We must
remember that other children have the same great-grandparents with
ourselves; that there have been inter-marriages; and that, after
all, the generations run on in parallel lines, that the lines
spread a little in some countries and periods, and narrow a little
in other countries and periods. It is like a wall covered with
paper in diamond pattern. The lines diverge and converge, but the
figures are parallel. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:7-94, Hist.
Doctrine, 2:1-26, Discourses and Essays, 259; Baird, Elohim
Revealed, 137-151, 335-384; Edwards, Works, 2:483; Hopkins, Works,
1:289; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 161; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych.,
128-142; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 59-224.

With regard to this view we remark:

(_a_) It seems best to accord with Scripture, which represents God as creating the species in Adam (Gen. 1:27), and as increasing and perpetuating it through secondary agencies (1:28; _cf._ 22). Only once is breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life (2:7, _cf._ 22; 1 Cor. 11:8. Gen. 4:1; 5:3; 46:26; _cf._ Acts 17:21-26; Heb. 7:10), and after man’s formation God ceases from his work of creation (Gen. 2:2).

_Gen. 1:27_—“_And God created man in his own image, in the image
of God created he him: male and female created he them_”;
_28_—“_And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth_”; _cf._ _22_—of the brute
creation: “_And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and
multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply
on the earth._” _Gen. 2:7_—“_And Jehovah God formed man of the
dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life; and man became a living soul_”; _cf._ _22_—“_and the rib
which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and
brought her unto the man_”; _1 Cor. 11:8_—“_For the man is not of
the woman; but the woman of the man_” (ἐξ ἀνδρός). _Gen.
4:1_—“_Eve ... bare Cain_”; _5:3_—“_Adam ... begat a son ...
Seth_”; _46:26_—“_All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt,
that came out of his loins_”; _Acts 17:26_—“_he made of one_
[“father” or “body”] _every nation of men_”; _Heb. 7:10_—Levi
“_was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedek met him_”;
_Gen. 2:2_—“_And on the seventh day God finished his work which he
had made, __ and he rested on the seventh day from all his work
which he had made._” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:19-29, adduces also
_John 1:13; 3:6_; _Rom. 1:13; 5:12_; _1 Cor. 15:22_; _Eph. 2:3_;
_Heb. 12:9_; _Ps. 139:15, 16_. Only Adam had the right to be a
creatianist. Westcott, Com. on Hebrews, 114—“Levi paying tithes in
Abraham implies that descendants are included in the ancestor so
far that his acts have force for them. Physically, at least, the
dead so rule the living. The individual is not a completely
self-centred being. He is member in a body. So far traducianism is
true. But, if this were all, man would be a mere result of the
past, and would have no individual responsibility. There is an
element not derived from birth, though it may follow upon it.
Recognition of individuality is the truth in creatianism. Power of
vision follows upon preparation of an organ of vision, modified by
the latter but not created by it. So we have the social unity of
the race, _plus_ the personal responsibility of the individual,
the influence of common thoughts _plus_ the power of great men,
the foundation of hope _plus_ the condition of judgment.”

(_b_) It is favored by the analogy of vegetable and animal life, in which increase of numbers is secured, not by a multiplicity of immediate creations, but by the natural derivation of new individuals from a parent stock. A derivation of the human soul from its parents no more implies a materialistic view of the soul and its endless division and subdivision, than the similar derivation of the brute proves the principle of intelligence in the lower animals to be wholly material.

God’s method is not the method of endless miracle. God works in
nature through second causes. God does not create a new vital
principle at the beginning of existence of each separate apple,
and of each separate dog. Each of these is the result of a
self-multiplying force, implanted once for all in the first of its
race. To say, with Moxom (Baptist Review, 1881:278), that God is
the immediate author of each new individual, is to deny second
causes, and to merge nature in God. The whole tendency of modern
science is in the opposite direction. Nor is there any good reason
for making the origin of the individual human soul an exception to
the general rule. Augustine wavered in his traducianism because he
feared the inference that the soul is divided and subdivided,—that
is, that it is composed of parts, and is therefore material in its
nature. But it does not follow that all separation is material
separation. We do not, indeed, know how the soul is propagated.
But we know that animal life is propagated, and still that it is
not material, nor composed of parts. The fact that the soul is not
material, nor composed of parts, is no reason why it may not be
propagated also.

It is well to remember that _substance_ does not necessarily imply
either _extension_ or _figure_. _Substantia_ is simply that which
stands under, underlies, supports, or in other words that which is
the _ground_ of phenomena. The propagation of mind therefore does
not involve any dividing up, or splitting off, as if the mind were
a material mass. Flame is propagated, but not by division and
subdivision. Professor Ladd is a creatianist, together with Lotze,
whom he quotes, but he repudiates the idea that the mind is
susceptible of division; see Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206,
359-366—“The mind comes from nowhere, for it never was, as mind,
in space, is not now in space, and cannot be conceived of as
coming and going in space.... Mind is a growth.... Parents do not
transmit their minds to their offspring. The child’s mind does not
exist before it acts. Its activities _are_ its existence.” So we
might say that flame has no existence before it acts. Yet it may
owe its existence to a preceding flame. The Indian proverb is: “No
lotus without a stem.” Hall Caine, in his novel The Manxman, tells
us that the Deemster of the Isle of Man had two sons. These two
sons were as unlike each other as are the inside and the outside
of a bowl. But the bowl was old Deemster himself. Hartley
Coleridge inherited his father’s imperious desire for stimulants
and with it his inability to resist their temptation.

(_c_) The observed transmission not merely of physical, but of mental and spiritual, characteristics in families and races, and especially the uniformly evil moral tendencies and dispositions which all men possess from their birth, are proof that in soul, as well as in body, we derive our being from our human ancestry.

Galton, in his Hereditary Genius, and Inquiries into Human
Faculty, furnishes abundant proof of the transmission of mental
and spiritual characteristics from father to son. Illustrations,
in the case of families, are the American Adamses, the English
Georges, the French Bourbons, the German Bachs. Illustrations, in
the case of races, are the Indians, the Negroes, the Chinese, the
Jews. Hawthorne represented the introspection and the conscience
of Puritan New England. Emerson had a minister among his ancestry,
either on the paternal or the maternal side, for eight generations
back. Every man is “a chip of the old block.” “A man is an
omnibus, in which all his ancestors are seated” (O. W. Holmes).
Variation is one of the properties of living things,—the other is
transmission. “On a dissecting table, in the membranes of a
new-born infant’s body, can be seen ‘the drunkard’s tinge.’ The
blotches on his grand-child’s cheeks furnish a mirror to the old
debauchee. Heredity is God’s visiting of sin to the third and
fourth generations.” On heredity and depravity, see Phelps, in
Bib. Sac., Apr. 1884:254—“When every molecule in the paternal
brain bears the shape of a point of interrogation, it would border
on the miraculous if we should find the exclamation-sign of faith
in the brain-cells of the child.”

Robert G. Ingersoll said that most great men have great mothers,
and that most great women have great fathers. Most of the great
are like mountains, with the valley of ancestors on one side and
the depression of posterity on the other. Hawthorne’s House of the
Seven Gables illustrates the principle of heredity. But in his
Marble Faun and Transformation, Hawthorne unwisely intimates that
sin is a necessity to virtue, a background or condition of good.
Dryden, Absalom and Ahithophel, 1:156—“Great wits are sure to
madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
Lombroso, The Man of Genius, maintains that genius is a mental
disease allied to epileptiform mania or the dementia of cranks. If
this were so, we should infer that civilization is the result of
insanity, and that, so soon as Napoleons, Dantes and Newtons
manifest themselves, they should be confined in Genius Asylums.
Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau, comes nearer the truth: “A
solitary great man’s worth the world. God takes the business into
his own hands At such time: Who creates the novel flower Contrives
to guard and give it breathing-room.... ’Tis the great Gardener
grafts the excellence On wildlings, where he will.”

(_d_) The traducian doctrine embraces and acknowledges the element of truth which gives plausibility to the creatian view. Traducianism, properly defined, admits a divine concurrence throughout the whole development of the human species, and allows, under the guidance of a superintending Providence, special improvements in type at the birth of marked men, similar to those which we may suppose to have occurred in the introduction of new varieties in the animal creation.

Page-Roberts, Oxford University Sermons: “It is no more unjust
that man should inherit evil tendencies, than that he should
inherit good. To make the former impossible is to make the latter
impossible. To object to the law of heredity, is to object to
God’s ordinance of society, and to say that God should have made
men, like the angels, a company, and not a race.” The common moral
characteristics of the race can only be accounted for upon the
Scriptural view that “_that which is born of the flesh is flesh_”
(_John 3:6_). Since propagation is a propagation of soul, as well
as body, we see that to beget children under improper conditions
is a crime, and that fœticide is murder. Haeckel, Evolution of
Man, 2:3—“The human embryo passes through the whole course of its
development in forty weeks. Each man is really older by this
period than is usually assumed. When, for example, a child is said
to be nine and a quarter years old, he is really ten years old.”
Is this the reason why Hebrews call a child a year old at birth?
President Edwards prayed for his children and his children’s
children to the end of time, and President Woolsey congratulated
himself that he was one of the inheritors of those prayers. R. W.
Emerson: “How can a man get away from his ancestors?” Men of
genius should select their ancestors with great care. When begin
the instruction of a child? A hundred years before he is born. A
lady whose children were noisy and troublesome said to a Quaker
relative that she wished she could get a good Quaker governess for
them, to teach them the quiet ways of the Society of Friends. “It
would not do them that service,” was the reply; “they should have
been rocked in a Quaker cradle, if they were to learn Quakerly
ways.”

Galton, Natural Inheritance, 104—“The child inherits partly from
his parents, partly from his ancestry. In every population that
intermarries freely, when the genealogy of any man is traced far
backwards, his ancestry will be found to consist of such varied
elements that they are indistinguishable from the sample taken at
haphazard from the general population. Galton speaks of the
tendency of peculiarities to revert to the general type, and says
that a man’s brother is twice as nearly related to him as his
father is, and nine times as nearly as his cousin. The mean
stature of any particular class of men will be the same as that of
the race; in other words, it will be mediocre. This tells heavily
against the full hereditary transmission of any rare and valuable
gift, as only a few of the many children would resemble their
parents.” We may add to these thoughts of Galton that Christ
himself, as respects his merely human ancestry, was not so much
son of Mary, as he was Son of man.

Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 144-167—In an investigated case,
“in seven and a half generations the maximum ancestry for one
person is 382, or for three persons 1146. The names of 452 of
them, or nearly half, are recorded, and these 452 named ancestors
are not 452 distinct persons, but only 149, many of them, in the
remote generations, being common ancestors of all three in many
lines. If the lines of descent from the unrecorded ancestors were
interrelated in the same way, as they would surely be in an old
and stable community, the total ancestry of these three persons
for seven and a half generations would be 378 persons instead of
1146. The descendants of many die out. All the members of a
species descend from a few ancestors in a remote generation, and
these few are the common ancestors of all. Extinction of family
names is very common. We must seek in the modern world and not in
the remote past for an explanation of that diversity among
individuals which passes under the name of variation. The
genealogy of a species is not a tree, but a slender thread of very
few strands, a little frayed at the near end, but of immeasurable
length. A fringe of loose ends all along the thread may represent
the animals which having no descendants are now as if they had
never been. Each of the strands at the near end is important as a
possible line of union between the thread of the past and that of
the distant future.”

Weismann, Heredity, 270, 272, 380, 384, denies Brooks’s theory
that the male element represents the principle of variation. He
finds the cause of variation in the union of elements from the two
parents. Each child unites the hereditary tendencies of two
parents, and so must be different from either. The third
generation is a compromise between four different hereditary
tendencies. Brooks finds the cause of variation in sexual
reproduction, but he bases his theory upon the transmission of
acquired characters. This transmission is denied by Weismann, who
says that the male germ-cell does not play a different part from
that of the female in the construction of the embryo. Children
inherit quite as much from the father as from the mother. Like
twins are derived from the same egg-cell. No two germ-cells
contain exactly the same combinations of hereditary tendencies.
Changes in environment and organism affect posterity, not
directly, but only through other changes produced in its germinal
matter. Hence efforts to reach high food cannot directly produce
the giraffe. See Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution, 235-239;
Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems; Ribot, Heredity; Woods,
Heredity in Royalty. On organic unity in connection with realism,
see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1865:126-135; Dabney, Theology,
317-321.

V. The Moral Nature of Man.

By the moral nature of man we mean those powers which fit him for right or wrong action. These powers are intellect, sensibility, and will, together with that peculiar power of discrimination and impulsion, which we call conscience. In order to have moral action, man has intellect or reason, to discern the difference between right and wrong; sensibility, to be moved by each of these; free will, to do the one or the other. Intellect, sensibility, and will, are man’s three faculties. But in connection with these faculties there is a sort of activity which involves them all, and without which there can be no moral action, namely, the activity of conscience. Conscience applies the moral law to particular cases in our personal experience, and proclaims that law as binding upon us. Only a rational and sentient being can be truly moral; yet it does not come within our province to treat of man’s intellect or sensibility in general. We speak here only of Conscience and of Will.

1. Conscience.

A. Conscience an accompanying knowledge.—As already intimated, conscience is not a separate faculty, like intellect, sensibility, and will, but rather a mode in which these faculties act. Like consciousness, conscience is an accompanying knowledge. Conscience is a knowing of self (including our acts and states) in connection with a moral standard, or law. Adding now the element of feeling, we may say that conscience is man’s consciousness of his own moral relations, together with a peculiar feeling in view of them. It thus involves the combined action of the intellect and of the sensibility, and that in view of a certain class of objects, viz.: right and wrong.

There is no separate ethical faculty any more than there is a
separate æsthetic faculty. Conscience is like taste: it has to do
with moral being and relations, as taste has to do with æsthetic
being and relations. But the ethical judgment and impulse are,
like the æsthetic judgment and impulse, the mode in which
intellect, sensibility and will act with reference to a certain
class of objects. Conscience deals with the right, as taste deals
with the beautiful. As consciousness (_con_ and _scio_) is a
con-knowing, a knowing of our thoughts, desires and volitions in
connection with a knowing of the self that has these thoughts,
desires and volitions; so conscience is a con-knowing, a knowing
of our moral acts and states in connection with a knowing of some
moral standard or law which is conceived of as our true self, and
therefore as having authority over us. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind,
183-185—“The condemnation of self involves self-diremption, double
consciousness. Without it Kant’s categorical imperative is
impossible. The one self lays down the law to the other self,
judges it, threatens it. This is what is meant, when the apostle
says: ‘_It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me_’
(_Rom. 7:17_).”

B. Conscience discriminative and impulsive.—But we need to define more narrowly both the intellectual and the emotional elements in conscience. As respects the intellectual element, we may say that conscience is a power of judgment,—it declares our acts or states to conform, or not to conform, to law; it declares the acts or states which conform to be obligatory,—those which do not conform, to be forbidden. In other words, conscience judges: (1) This is right (or, wrong); (2) I ought (or, I ought not). In connection with this latter judgment, there comes into view the emotional element of conscience,—we feel the claim of duty; there is an inner sense that the wrong must not be done. Thus conscience is (1) discriminative, and (2) impulsive.

Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 173—“The one
distinctive function of conscience is that of authoritative
self-judgments in the conscious presence of a supreme Personality
to whom we as persons feel ourselves accountable. It is this
twofold personal element in every judgment of conscience, _viz._,
the conscious self-judgment in the presence of the all-judging
Deity, which has led such writers as Bain and Spencer and Stephen
to attempt the explanation of the origin and authority of
conscience as the product of parental training and social
environment.... Conscience is not prudential nor advisory nor
executive, but solely judicial. Conscience is the moral reason,
pronouncing upon moral actions. Consciousness furnishes law;
conscience pronounces judgments; it says: Thou shalt, Thou shalt
not. Every man must obey his conscience; if it is not enlightened,
that is his look-out. The callousing of conscience in this life is
already a penal infliction.” S. S. Times, Apl. 5, 1902:185—“Doing
as well as we know how is not enough, unless we know just what is
right and then do that. God never tells us merely to do our best,
or according to our knowledge. It is our duty to know what is
right, and then to do it. Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. We
have responsibility for knowing preliminary to doing.”

C. Conscience distinguished from other mental processes.—The nature and office of conscience will be still more clearly perceived if we distinguish it from other processes and operations with which it is too often confounded. The term conscience has been used by various writers to designate either one or all of the following: 1. _Moral intuition_—the intuitive perception of the difference between right and wrong, as opposite moral categories. 2. _Accepted law_—the application of the intuitive idea to general classes of actions, and the declaration that these classes of actions are right or wrong, apart from our individual relation to them. This accepted law is the complex product of (_a_) the intuitive idea, (_b_) the logical intelligence, (_c_) experiences of utility, (_d_) influences of society and education, and (e) positive divine revelation. 3. _Judgment_—applying this accepted law to individual and concrete cases in our own experience, and pronouncing our own acts or states either past, present, or prospective, to be right or wrong. 4. _Command_—authoritative declaration of obligation to do the right, or forbear the wrong, together with an impulse of the sensibility away from the one, and toward the other. 5. _Remorse_ or _approval_—moral sentiments either of approbation or disapprobation, in view of past acts or states, regarded as wrong or right. 6. _Fear_ or _hope_—instinctive disposition of disobedience to expect punishment, and of obedience to expect reward.