Chapter II: Part 2

But this is not all; at certain stages of the organism self-division ceases. The final divisions result in strikingly modified forms of the organism; these approach each other and melt together. They are then shining globules without action, but at the end of a given time they open, and pour out a continuous cloud of minutest spore or ova, which are as countless as the sands; and from these arise again another host of the organisms, which pass again through all the mystery and marvel of this vital cycle.

And this is the third of the qualities that make what lives absolutely unique amidst the things of earth.

This is life—whether vegetable or animal none can determine—in the simplest form in which it can be known; life that is possessed only of the irreducible properties which are inalienable, and which distinguish it for ever and everywhere from what is not-life.

It is true that the philosopher, by the common consent of mind, occupies the throne of intellect; but it is not, for all that, to the esoteric philosopher, not to the deep mental seer, who girdles all space, all duration, all phenomena with his thought, that nature reveals her latest, her subtlest, her profoundest secrets. It is to the patient student—nature’s loving learner, whose eye and ear are trained to read her faintest writing and catch her lowest whisper—that her deepest truths in all their strength and immediate bearing are disclosed. Yet the fates of philosophies are determined by these.

Then what is the testimony of students and searchers as to the mode in which life takes its origin to-day? Does life originate _in_ life? or do we find that in our laboratories, and in the observed processes of nature _now_, the not-living can be, without the intervention of living things, changed into that which lives?

Biology, as a science, answers ‘no.’ Says the greatest master of all the facts, Professor Huxley: ‘The properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, and,’ he continues, ‘the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living.’[15]

Then what lives is, in its qualities, utterly unlike—sharply marked off from—what is not living. Yet the elements that make up the living stuff are the most common on the earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen: we know them each and all; we know their properties and reactions on each other, and on all the minor elements of the living matter; but that knowledge only complicates the nature of the problem. The mystery of life is, not that any occult elements compose the matter in which it dwells; the mystery of life consists solely in the question, _how_ the elements that make up protoplasm can be so combined, as, by their combination, to acquire the splendid and solitary properties of that which lives.

Manifestly, then, there was a time in the past history of the globe, when its matter was without life, and therefore there must have been a time, perhaps at a point of intense activity in the not-living matter of the globe, when it became endowed with the properties of life.

[Footnote 15: _Ency. Brit._ art. ‘Biology,’ vol. iii. p. 679.]

By what agency that transcendent upward movement was wrought, science claims no vocation to inquire. But let the earth, and air, and sea, with all their teeming denizens, attest,—that power was competent.

Now let us ask, can we as rational beings account for all the properties of living things in terms of matter and motion? Will vibrating atoms, with millenniums of ages to work in, but no power to direct them, explain the wonder? Was the transmutation of not-living matter into living brought about merely by what we can reduce to solid geometry and transcendental numbers? atoms, which we can approximately measure, dancing to the rhythm of complex motion?

All that mechanical evolution has to work with, is atoms and motions. Pile the atoms into complexities too large for clear thought, cluster molecule round molecule, and let them beat in multitudinous harmonies defiant of conception, yet all you have is matter in motion. It is not life with its sentiency; it is not life with its self-chosen movement; it is not life with its power to construct its own substance out of matter that is dead, and to multiply its kind _ad libitum_.

And yet Mr. Spencer begins by taking what no mental manipulation of the naked formula of his philosophy could provide, the ‘elements’ of our present chemistry; and by imagining higher and higher complexities of atomic structure a complicated molecule is reached; and then, by a change in name, which is justified by no change in the facts, he calls the complex substance organic matter; and by simply continuing this process, thinks he sees it become living.[16]

[Footnote 16: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 481.]

The justification of all this is the affirmation ‘that organic matter was not produced all at once,’ and that there is in the laboratory of the chemist ‘what we may literally call artificial evolution.’ Mr. Spencer instances a laboratory product of what is counted a sufficiently typical organic compound.[17] But to obtain it the chemist has to employ no less than twenty distinct chemical and physical processes, involving many varying temperatures, from a red heat to the intensity of the electric arc, and between thirty and forty reagents and their products, are employed in the process. Compare this with the silent and impenetrable simplicity of the chemistry of life, and vivid and striking is the contrast. And yet when this product of the chemist lies before you, produced by the tremendous relative labours of the laboratory, it is as far off from dead white of egg, to say nothing of living protoplasm, as the qualities of a flint pebble are from the qualities of the diamond.

[Footnote 17: The Butyrate of dimethylamin.]

The _facts_ of nature—surely our safest guide—declare that the transition from not-life to life is abrupt. The break is absolute and clear. A ‘complex molecule’ is a molecule of atoms in motion,—nothing more. More atoms and more motion cannot, by themselves, as Mr. Spencer would teach, make it ‘organic;’ much less can any further addition of atoms and tremors make it live. It is in vain for Haeckel to call the simplest moneron that lives ‘primeval slime,’ or to call numbers of them ‘individualized lumps of albumen.’ It is a travesty. Under the same lens place ‘a lump of albumen’ and the lowest _living_ infusorian, and a voiceless contradiction of Haeckel’s phrase which none can ever question is indubitably given. The infusorian lives; the albumen is dead. The infusorian constructs the vital matter of its own body from the heterogeneous matter in which it lives; the albumen decomposes as it lies there. The infusorian has soon multiplied by millions, while the albumen disappears by decadence. To write of living monera as ‘albumen,’ or of ‘complex molecules’ with nothing more than their complexity, as _living_, is to contradict, in the name, the essential and distinguishing qualities of both.

This impropriety may be yet more manifest by another quotation from Haeckel. His aim is to endeavour by the use of vague language to reduce the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living, and he writes of the animal _ovum_, as ‘a little lump of albumen in which another albuminous body is enclosed—the nucleus.’ What profound trifling is this! Think of, say a human ovum, an invisible particle less than the hundredth of an inch in diameter; it _lives_; and there lies coiled up in the mystery of its minuteness all the potentiality of the highest manhood; all the possible power of Socrates, or Homer, or Goethe. Is that simply ‘a lump of albumen’? Not unless a man can be justly described as such, by the bottles of chemical substances to which his body can be reduced.

Even Mr. Spencer pleads that ‘the lowest living things are not, properly speaking, organisms at all, for they have no distinctions of parts, no traces of organization.’ If it were true that our lenses cannot reveal organization in the lowliest and smallest organisms, does it follow that there _is_ none? Will Mr. Spencer risk the validity of the doctrine of material atoms on the ability of our lenses to show the atom? Surely not.

But the affirmation is not supported by facts. The splendid increase of microscopical lens power during the past decade has not only enabled us to see that there is complexity and structure in both the animal and vegetable cell, which bisects by an elaborate process; but even the minute nucleus of the minutest organisms, often not more than one tenth part of the infinitesimal body itself, is now proved to undergo profound structural changes, which precede all the great cyclic changes of the organism as a whole. The nucleus is the centre, in fact, of all the higher activities of the least and lowest infusoria; and is the centre of most delicate but clearly demonstrable structural changes.[18]

[Footnote 18: _Jour. Roy. Micro. Soc._, President’s Address, 1886.]

We cannot reduce the mystery of life by treating contemptuously its ultimate cells. They are as defiant of interpretation by our present methods as the more complex structures they compose. The mystery of life, _per se_, is as great and as deep, in a monad and a mildew, as in a man. Every attempt to argue away the meaning of vital function and property, on the basis of the organic simplicity of unicellular organisms, is wholly fallacious. It is knowledge, not speculation, which affirms that the least and lowest, as well as the largest and most complex of living forms, are distinguished absolutely from all other kinds of things. There is ‘no link’ between matter living and matter without life. To attempt to build up ‘life’ by slow increments of added complexity, in atomic or molecular structure, is a philosophical ingenuity; but it expresses no natural truth within the horizon of our knowledge. A higher number of primal, or even chemical atoms, arranged in the most complex ratios, and affected by the most rhythmic movements, are not the data from which to deduce a living organism. And to affirm of the lowest living things that ‘they are not, properly speaking, organisms at all,’[19] because the instruments used at a given date did not reveal structure, is, at best, an _argumentum a silentio_; while simultaneously it contradicts the facts of biology, and assumes the whole point at issue.

[Footnote 19: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 482.]

On the other hand, there is not a single fact within the present range of our knowledge that indicates, or even suggests, that the quarternary compounds approximate, under any known conditions, to the state of matter living.

As the sheets of this Lecture are passing through the press, Sir Henry Roscoe, as President of the British Association, has delivered a brilliant and essentially scientific address. On the subject of chemistry none can speak with a voice more authoritative: and on this very question he writes as follows: ‘But now the question may well be put—Is any limit set to this synthetic power of the chemist? Although the danger of dogmatizing as to the progress of science has already been shown in too many instances, yet one cannot help feeling that the barrier which exists between the organized and unorganized worlds is one which the chemist sees no chance of breaking down. It is true that there are those who profess to foresee that the day will arrive, when the chemist, by a succession of constructive efforts, may pass beyond albumen, and gather the elements of lifeless matter into a living structure. Whatever may be said regarding this from other standpoints, the chemist can only say that at present no such problem lies within his province. Protoplasm, with which the simplest manifestations of life are associated, is not a compound, but a structure built up of compounds. The chemist may successfully synthesize any of its component molecules, but he has no more reason to look forward to the synthetic production of the structure than to imagine that the synthesis of gallic acid leads to the artificial production of gall-nuts.’[20]

To assume, then, that by starting with atoms in equilibriated motions, uncounted millenniums of ages ago, and that by adding atoms and groups of atoms, with altered and re-altered motions as the ages roll away, with the result that at last, with these factors and no others, we shall get organism and life, is, surely, as fallacious as to explain Millais’s picture of the Huguenots as having been brought about by a skilful arrangement of palettes and brushes, easels and pigments.

Now let it be clearly recalled that Charles Darwin involved himself in none of this philosophic ambiguity. To him life was more than a complexity of elementary atoms affected by motion. It was something he could not ‘explain.’ He postulated, therefore, the unexplained presence of ‘primordial living germs,’ endowed with the properties, which, experience teaches, are possessed by living matter to-day.

How, in the great past, mineral and gaseous matters on this earth were, as a question of scientific method, so affected as to become living matter is, to our present resources at least, impenetrable.

[Footnote 20: The _Times_ report of the address of Sir H. E. Roscoe before the British Association at Manchester.—_Times_, September 1, 1887.]

‘Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower.—But _if_ I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.’

I merely contend that whatever were the means by which dead matter first lived, they were higher, infinitely higher, than matter and motion; they could only have been the resources of a _competent_ power.

I adopt gladly the language of Professor Huxley: ‘Belief, in the scientific sense of the word,’ he says, ‘is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not-living matter.’[21] So should I.

[Footnote 21: _Critiques and Addresses_, p. 239.]

By what other means than by the operation of natural ‘laws’ can we think of the Infinite Power, extending through all extent, as the fountain of all being, as acting? Every process of nature that ever man has investigated throughout all space and all time, results from a perfect and unalterable method which we call a ‘law’ of nature. Then why should the primal process, by which not-living matter became, once for all, living, be brought about by any other means than the predetermined action of competent natural laws? Because life—living matter—does not _now_ arise directly from that which is not-life, does it follow that the creative method was discontinuous? that the primordial creative laws willed into operation ‘in the beginning’ were only competent to evolve the inorganic and not-living? and that at this point a supernatural ‘interference,’ a ‘miraculous interposition,’ had to be effected to endow what was dead with the transcendent properties of life? The whole line of human experience, interpreted in the light of modern scientific knowledge, compels the conclusion that the ‘primordial germs’ in which life on earth began, arose by the operation of natural creative laws. That an energy, not now operating within the area of our experience, was at work, when not-living matter progressed into living structure, is certain. But there is nothing, within the range of our knowledge, that permits the inference that it was brought about by any other means, than such as, if we could have seen them in operation, we should have called ‘laws’ of nature. This view surely ennobles without limit our fatally humanized view of creative action. ‘The beginning’ was thus, by the unsearchable mystery of a creative mind and will, the _potentiality_ of all the universe through all its duration; which it only required ‘time’ in which the potential powers and modes should operate, to make actual, in the universe we see.

As the highest mental powers and products of the most gifted of our race, were originally potential in the primitive ovum from which each took his origin, so, it is congruous, and capable of being grasped by our thought although it cannot be portrayed by our imagination, that the mind and will of the inscrutable Creator prevised and preordered the whole series of conditions which, by their immutable action, interaction, and rhythmic concurrence as ‘laws,’ evolved the universe.

So far as the finest and keenest researches in chemistry and physics carry us, especially such researches as those of Crooks and Lockyer, it is powerfully indicated that the creative method in the inorganic world was a sublime progressive plan, a building up by law, of the dome of heaven and the floor of earth, and all that goes with both. But behind the matter and the motion, above the energies and the force, there surely was, as we have been constrained to see, what we can only think of as the conception, the purpose, and the will by which the evolving order, marked in high, and higher sublimity, the upward and onward movement of the ripening and uncounted ages.

But when the highest point of the inorganic, the not-living, was reached, and a new factor had to appear in the world to crown some of its matter with _life_ and all its wonders, what was it that ensued? If ‘law’ did not cease to act; if there were no break in the continuity of evolution, and yet a factor of power, not now operating within the range of our knowledge, was absolutely necessary to change the not-living matter of the earth into matter that lived, how was it brought about?

Our inability to reply, does not invalidate the facts on the one hand, nor justify attempts at explanations that find no sanction in experience and knowledge on the other.

Suggestion by analogy, feeble as it is, is the nearest approach that we can make to the solution of what must, perhaps, remain for ever a splendid mystery.

If creation be, then, the expression of the mind and will of a Creator, uttered in method and issuing in phenomena, he must see the end from the beginning: his resource is infinite. The human mathematician, of the highest order, can devise, with all the adaptations and prearrangements that are needed, an instrument or machine, which shall continue for a number of motions, without necessary limit, according to a primal law, but which by such prevised and preordered arrangements would, suddenly, at the required point of time, undergo change, and operate henceforth after a law entirely new.

An instrument has actually been made which was competent to effect the solution of quadratic equations whose roots are real. One has also been made capable of effecting the determination of the real roots of any equation. It is perfectly conceivable that an instrument could be made which should go on finding the real roots only, for a measured time, and then by a prearranged and provided method should suddenly, by the very laws and principles of its construction, so change, that for another period, or for evermore, it should also determine the imaginary roots.

Is it not conceivable that infinite resource, infinite wisdom, infinite prevision and power could in a manner which this illustration only suggests have caused the non-vital universe to become in some parts vital? Could not infinite power, infinite wisdom, the originator of all that we call material phenomena, have prevised and preordered, in the impenetrable mystery of ‘the beginning,’ that the creative laws of evolution for an inorganic world, should, as they brought about the completion of their perfect purpose, have carried with them from that ‘beginning’ preordered potentialities, that should, by the primal volition of the Creator, emerge, as an inevitable and orderly sequence, into the operation of higher activities and new laws?

If that may not be, it is not a divine being that is in our thought. But if that may be, then the self-acting laws of nature are self-acting, as the products of eternal mind and will. Each self-acting phenomenon is, to us, an embodied thought of God; emerging in matter now, as a consequence of the sublimity and perfection of the methods divinely willed ‘in the beginning.’

Let this illustration weigh for what it will; this at least is clear, that the mechanical philosophy, whether or not it refuses to be called ‘material,’ has proved its formula incompetent. Atomic matter without property, affected by motion, with persistent relations between the matter and the motion, can no more account for the universe even up to the point of the origin of the lowest life, than the vibrations of a musical chord can account for the joy begotten of music.

But how stands the problem of its origin, when, in that which lives, we include the presence of mind? None more firmly contends for the absolute disparity, the entire and unqualified difference between mind and matter, than Mr. Spencer. To him there can be nothing within the whole realm of thought severed by a wider interval than consciousness and thought on the one hand, and matter on the other. ‘Just,’ he says, ‘in the same way that the object is the unknown permanent _nexus_ which is never itself a phenomenon, but is that which holds phenomena together, so is the subject the unknown permanent _nexus_ which is never itself a state of consciousness, but which holds all states of consciousness together.’[22] Mind and matter, then, are here admitted to be infinitely unlike, but absolutely equal realities. This is boldly reaffirmed; he says: ‘No effort of imagination enables us to think of a shock, however minute, except as undergone by an entity. We are compelled, therefore, to postulate a substance of mind that is affected, before we can think of its affections.’[23]

[Footnote 22: _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p. 484.]

[Footnote 23: _Ibid._ vol. i. p. 627.]

This is as clear as a geometric definition. Mind and matter are admitted to be the two opposite termini of thought; they are divided by an interval beyond which thought cannot go. They are symbolized as _x_ and _y_, two equally unknown, but absolutely unlike, quantities. Beyond the common fact of existence, there is not a quality of the one that is not infinitely unlike all the qualities of the other.

What this disparity is we all know: enough, that matter is inert, absolutely without perceiving power, and unable in itself to move or to produce motion. But mind is conscious, knows that it exists; and, however mysteriously, originates motion. Matter has mass; mind is absolutely without it. Matter cannot be thought of save as an occupant of space. Mind has no extension.

Is it conceivable, then, that we should be required by this philosophy, which thus admits the utter disparity of mind and matter, to make mind a function of matter? that we should be asked to mentally follow a process by which _y_ shall be changed into _x_? This verily is so!

I must repeat the formula of this philosophy of evolution. ‘Evolution is an integration of matter, and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.’

Matter and motion, these are the all; no suggestion of aught besides. Then, if on that formula the philosophy is built, the rhythmic vicissitudes through which matter has passed during limitless millenniums of time, are supposed to be able to change matter’s unconsciousness into self-perception and thought; to cause extended and gravitating mass to pass into an unextended realization of its own being, unyoked to gravity; to emerge from space relations involving motion produced by outside forces, to an absolute independence of space relations which makes motion impossible. If we make our _knowledge_ of phenomena and the processes and methods of Nature the basis of our judgment, is it not manifest, that such a change is incapable of being thought?

The unknown _y_, that is, matter, must, by sheer physical vicissitudes, actually abnegate its own qualities, and emerge, no longer _itself_, _y_, but another entity, infinitely unlike itself, that is, _x_!

If mind and matter are divergent from each other by infinite unlikeness of quality, the mind refuses assent, that any process, based on the foundation of accurate human knowledge, would sanction the emergence of mind by physical processes from matter. Mind is the antithesis, and cannot be a function, of matter.

The mind is intimately linked with cerebral action. We do not know mind apart from brain; but there is no discovered correlation between the _work_ of the brain, and consciousness. Dr. Tyndall, whose keen and instructed intellect has addressed itself to this deep problem from the position of a physicist, says, amongst many similar utterances: ‘But when we endeavour to pass ... from the phenomena of physics to those of thought, we meet a problem which transcends any conceivable expansion of the powers which we now possess. We may think over the subject again and again, but it eludes all intellectual presentation. We stand at length face to face with the incomprehensible. The territory of physics is wide, but it has its limits, from which we look with vacant gaze into the region beyond, ... and thus it will ever loom, compelling the philosophies of successive ages to confess that—

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our life
Is rounded by a sleep.”’[24]

[Footnote 24: _Fragments of Science_, vol. ii. pp. 393, 394.]

The same thinker asks, ‘What is the causal connexion ... between molecular motions and states of consciousness?’ And he answers that neither he nor any other can know; and adds: ‘It is no explanation to say that the objective and subjective are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should the phenomenon have two sides? This is the very core of the difficulty. There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it runs into frost ferns upon a window pane? If not, why should the molecular motion of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion—consciousness?’[25]

[Footnote 25: _Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 410.]

Says Professor Tait, one of our most distinguished physicists: ‘There are ... things associated with living beings which, of course, no one in his senses can regard as physical. Even such things as consciousness and volition we have absolutely no reason, however vague, for classifying even in the smallest degree under the head of physics.’[26]

[Footnote 26: _Recent Advances in Physical Science_, p. 70.]

‘I,’ writes Professor Huxley, ‘know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected.’[27] And again, ‘All our knowledge is a knowledge of states of consciousness. “Matter” and “force” are, so far as we can know, mere names for certain forms of consciousness.‘[28]

[Footnote 27: _Contemporary Review_, Nov. 1871: ‘Mr. Darwin and his Critics.’]

[Footnote 28: _Lay Sermons_, p. 373.]

Such disparity is there, then, between matter and mind, that it would be apparently as congruous to conceive of a thought as solidifying itself into a material object, as to conceive of any affection of material molecules as being the sole cause of thought. Hence, it follows that the Spencerian philosophy, which affirms the absolute distinctness of mind from matter, on the one hand; but, having no other structural elements _than_ matter in motion, on the other hand, seeks to educe mind from these, is surely incongruous, and fails.

The demand is, that the primal atoms of the cosmic cloud, without a single logically added agent besides, have, by combining and recombining, by changing size and shape and intensifying the complexity of their motions, at last emerged into ‘I am,’ ‘I can,’ ‘I ought;’ that in effect they have written Faust and Hamlet, produced philosophies, discovered gravitation, calculated eclipses, realized the eternal nobility of right and the eternal baseness of wrong: in brief, have brought about the moral and intellectual manhood that is ours. What we _know_ by scientific evidence is this: that the persistence of force makes the relations of matter and force permanent. Says Faraday: ‘A particle of oxygen is ever a particle of oxygen, nothing can in the least wear it. If it enters into combination and reappears as oxygen—if it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral—if it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved—it is oxygen with its first qualities, neither more nor less. It has all its original force, and only that.’[29]

[Footnote 29: _Philosophical Mag._, iv. 13, p. 235.]

Then, in all the area of the universe as we know it, that is, within the range of our experience and experiment, infinite vicissitude leaves what we know as an elementary body, with its first qualities intact, neither more nor less. But we must transcend experience, disregard the evidence before us, and _believe_ that if we give the primal atoms with their inalienable motion _time enough_, they will emerge at last, not only as life, but as intellect!

Can it avail to repudiate materialism, and yet to philosophically conjure mind out of matter? We must indeed recast our definition of matter to do this; but how? Says Professor Max Müller: ‘Mill declares in one place (_Logic_ v. 3, 3) that it is a mere fallacy to say that matter cannot think. Here again he ought to define first of all what he means by matter, and according to his definition it may or may not be a fallacy to say that matter cannot think. If we say that matter cannot think, we do not say so because we cannot conceive thought to be annexed to any arrangement of material particles ... the reason why we are justified in saying “matter cannot think” is our having in our language and thought separated matter from thought, our having called and conceived what is without thought matter, and what is without matter thought. Having done this, we are as certain that our matter cannot think as that A=A and not =B.‘[30]

[Footnote 30: _The Science of Thought_, p. 616.]

The verdict of consciousness is the immovable base of all mental action. Our consciousness affirms our personality and insists on our identity. The Ego is conscious of itself as the hidden thread of unity on which are strung all the past and present states of consciousness and thought. Separate ‘states of consciousness’ as affections of matter we have seen are impossible. But even if they could exist, _to_ whom is their existence? A pang of unutterable remorse, a thrill of keenest pleasure, do not feel themselves. I feel them; what is that I, to whom the feeling is? It is always there, and in the language of Spencer already quoted ‘is the unknown permanent _nexus_ which is never itself a state of consciousness, but which holds all states of consciousness together.’ Then it is as real and more absolute than the ‘states of consciousness’ themselves.

The personal pronouns are as plentiful in the language of modern materialists as in the language of sentiment or theology. What do they represent?

Looking back and looking forward, thinking of ‘what might have been’ and anticipating what will be; and being absolutely conscious that it is ‘I’ in unchanged and unchanging identity that am looking back upon myself, and looking forward to myself, is unthinkable, unless _something_ to which all successive states of consciousness have been, are, and shall be, is admitted. If I deny the separate existence of the Ego, I to all intents and purposes deny that I am, and yet it is I that am there, perjuring myself by the denial.

Not only is there consciousness and thought, memory and prevision, power and volition; but the person, the identity that is conscious and thinks, that remembers and anticipates, that is able and that wills, is an inextinguishable factor of being. And for this there is no provision in the formula of the Spencerian Philosophy.

True, as we have seen, it is fain to admit, outside its formula, the existence of a permanent somewhat lying beneath and outlasting all the flow of mental states; that it has always existed, that it must exist for evermore; that it is a ‘power’ sometimes identified with ‘force;’ but it is contended that this is infinitely and for ever unknowable. With this we cannot be concerned; in practice it is an abstraction equal to nothing. But it is no element of our analysis; it is no factor of the formula which contained the only data required by this philosophy to construct the universe. We cannot assume that this power was the cause of matter, or the cause of motion; for we are shown that we can know nothing concerning it. But this also is of no moment; for matter, motion, and the combinations they bring about, over countless millenniums of time, clearly understood, and fully interpreted, are supposed to contain in themselves, the explanation of all that is. But surely the promise of this philosophy is unfulfilled, its pledge is broken; it left its formula at the very outset of its career, and has employed structural principles, which to _it_ are absolutely alien.

Then to affirm that mind does not exist is impossible; to affirm that matter gave origin to mind is a contradiction. There is but one alternative: it is, that in the beginning, mind, acting through and in matter, by immutable and perfect modes, through unmeasured time, caused matter to assume its forms and display its phenomena; and, being mind, imparted mind to the universe wherever it is found: crowning all, in the moral and intellectual nature of man.

Thus the ultimate demand of thought, of reason, and of consciousness, is that when we are unravelling the modes of phenomena, pushing our inquiries into the conditions of all existences, generalizing vast areas of knowledge, expressing in formula of geometry and numbers the splendid rhythm and order of all things in heaven and earth, we are simply finding, and expressing, the thoughts of an Infinite Intelligence; discovering the modes by which His immutable perfections were caused to take form in matter and mind.

It is science alone that can discover and express the _mode_ of action; it is theology alone that must strive reverently to lead the mind up from the mode, not to the _conception_, but to the inevitable existence and thought of the Creator.

In doing this, to suppose that there are no intellectual difficulties is to manifest narrow mental grasp; but there are no absolute contradictions; no incongruities intolerable to the mind. True, as we have seen above, we encounter the inevitable fact of the uncreate existence of the Infinite. But we have seen that this, though infinitely impenetrable by us for ever, is still not repugnant to our reasoning and moral faculties. Indeed the eternal existence of _matter_ as not requiring proof is one of the assumptions of some materialists. But surely the self and necessary existence of an intelligent omnipotence is without measure more congruous. It has been argued that the eternity of matter is thinkable, because matter is immutable—retains its properties through every vicissitude conceivable in time and space. But surely gravity is an indispensable quality of matter; yet take a bar of iron, weighing a thousand pounds at the sea level, four miles high, and it loses two pounds of its weight; carry it to the distance of the moon from the earth, and it weighs but five ounces; and at a distance which could be computed its gravity would be absolutely lost. It is conceivable that all the ‘modes of motion’ by which matter is known to us, might, if we knew enough concerning them, be found to have conditions in which they would cease to operate. We must know that matter is unchangeable before the argument is valid. But even then it is incompetent.

What the mind asks, is power and intelligence, to account for the majesty of the universe, and the existence of mind; and if their cause, to be such, must be admitted to be uncaused, the majority of reflective minds can accept this, and in doing so, can fairly rest, and fully hope.

But, this granted, the question shapes itself afresh, ‘In the beginning what?’ Had matter a coeval existence, an eternal being like God? or did He create it? bring, what to our senses is something, directly out of nothing? None dare answer. Both suggestions refuse to be dealt with by reason. But the incongruity of both might vanish like starlight in the dawn, if we knew _what_ that is, which constitutes matter. It would, perhaps, make the Divine mind more immanent than we could dare to imagine. But it is easier without measure, judged of by our only source of knowledge, our own mental experience, to conceive of matter as a product of mind, than mind as a product of matter.

What, then, is it that the reverent mean by a ‘creative act’? What is involved in the affirmation, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’? _Must_ the answer be speculative? or does the evidence of Nature indicate a method? If the answer must be wholly speculative, it is without a shred of value. But if the _mode_ of creation be a question of evidence, who are the witnesses? They are those who are students and masters of the _facts_ of Nature. Willing or not willing, in the end, we _must_ accept the facts of Science. What, from the very nature and constitution of our mind, we are bound to accept as truth, it would be a travesty of all morality to ignore, much more to reject.

What was gained to morals, or religion, by rejecting Galileo’s demonstration of a revolving earth and a central sun? When Kepler demonstrated the laws of planetary motion, in the spirit of his age he was obliged to suppose that the direct motion of the planets was brought about by some spirit influence which he denominated ‘immateriate species,’ capable of overcoming the inertia of material bodies. But the splendid insight of Newton enabled him to perceive, that the laws of planetary motion, were a consequence of the cosmical law of gravitation. This took the moving planets out of spirit hands, and reduced the music of their motions to a method—a mechanical ‘law.’ To thousands that was deemed a truce to ‘atheism;’ but it is an unalterable truth; and men yet believe in God.

Within the range of living memory it has been held as vital to the existence of theology that creation, from the stars that fringe the margin of the universe, to the earth, and the crown of manhood, arose in six literal days. But science, with no weapon but inexorable fact, has made this for ever untenable. But the foundations of religion are unshaken.

Science has removed whole regions and æons of phenomena, from what was considered the supernatural, to the natural; but to believe that this is so much lost to theology is a feeble and faithless fallacy.

That conception of the Great Creator which takes its rise in the majestic law of universal gravitation must be sublimer than that which thought of Him as telling off spirits to move, and bear up the planets, in their paths.

Can that be a higher view of an illimitable Creative Mind, which conceived of Him as a Power who caused the earth to be formed, and the heavens to be filled, in six literal days, rather than to think of Him to whom there can be no yesterday and no to-morrow, but an unchanging now, as determining laws and forces, which, in the slow progression of uncounted ages, should express His creative will and accomplish His Divine idea?

I have read in vain, I have thought in vain, to understand what to later theologians was the method and the meaning of a creative act. ‘Order is heaven’s first law;’ and law—method—is the very pulse of order. Surely creative action in matter could only have proceeded by law? It could only have been the prevision and predetermination, by the inscrutable Creator, of definite affections of matter by force, issuing in rhythmic motions and cosmic harmonies, which, by their progress through immeasurable time, should accomplish the creative purpose. ‘Let there be light;’ that is the equivalent, in human thought, of an incomprehensible Divine volition. ‘And there was light,’ that is, in human phrase, the affirmation of its historic accomplishment. But to those who know, as we at present do, the science of light, what time, what power, what majesty of method, did its perfect accomplishment involve!

‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven.’ That, in human phrase, and according to human modes of thought, expresses the mysterious intent of Almighty Mind to fill space with the splendour we see; and to people it with intelligence of which we can form no faintest vision. ‘And it was so,’ that is the record of the realized intent. But how realized? Not by a material actor who

‘Rounded in his palm those spacious orbs,
And bowled them flaming through the dark profound.’

That is impossible to thought; a travesty of the sublimer conceptions possible, even to finite minds. Then do we conceive them as, in our human sense, leaping into existence and place and relation and motion and order? All our knowledge repudiates this merely human conception.

The only conception we can justly form is, that in the awful mystery of creative action, Divine will determined law, modes of affection of matter by motion, through force: making the dome of heaven and the peopled earth the realized will of the Eternal.

‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.’ That is the utterance of the human conception, which can alone represent to us the Divine resolve to fill the earth with life—and the joy of living things. ‘And it was so.’ But what epochs of countless ages filled the incalculable interval! What life on life, through age on age, moved in stately march from the lower to the higher, while the rocks kept imperishable record! The facts of geology, so far as they carry us, are more accurate and certain than any records of human history. And the irresistible lesson taught by the accurate study of the fossil flora and fauna, from the dawn of the Laurentian epoch, is a persistent and upward unfolding of life-forms by law; and the operation of the law is as manifest, as the operation of the law of increasing adaptation is visible, in a historical study of naval architecture, from the first rude plank, the dangerous raft, right up, through all increasing adjustments and improved design, to the latest ship with stately curves and splendid speed.

There is a sense indeed in which creation by evolution or development is taking place for ever around us. Development is evolution beginning at a fixed point; evolution is only development _ab initio_.

Every spore that unfolds itself into a fern, every seed that gives origin to another tenant of the forest, every egg that peoples earth or air or sea with another life, is an instance of development. It is only abbreviated evolution; evolution which gives a written record of its laws in every stage, down to the primitive ovum. There the record of the organism in itself ceases. The primitive ovum is a simple cell. The worm, the grayling, the eagle, the man, are evolved from such.

But can the egg unfold itself from this protoplasmic speck by any process save that of predetermined law and energy? Is not every law that shall act, and all the unchangeable power to enforce it, contained potentially in that globule of matter which we cannot see? Every change that is wrought, from the first that is discoverable, to the last that ensues, in the evolving egg, is one unbroken stream of method; force, with mandates, as it were, acting on matter, with special adaptations. Never did human mechanist strive more visibly to embody his prescribed purpose than do the progressive activities of the embryo lead straight to the final result. They did not, as movements, determine their own actions, or the actions of each other; they all lay together potentially from the first.

In this, if you will carry back the conception of Divine law and purpose to the beginning, and apply it to the incomprehensible majesty of the universe, I can see a miniature of suggestion as to the creative method.

Can it strip theology of one ray of the splendour of Deity, to find, from the evidence of nature, that He thought, and willed into action, the balanced forces and immutable laws, which were so related to each other, and to the foreseen requirements of onward and upward movement, that their progress is music, and their products are harmonies?—perfect adjustments—and, amidst ever-changing circumstances, ever-changing adaptations and self-adjusted design?

Can there be any splendour of the Infinite mind more ineffable and effulgent than the evidence, in His works, that in the beginning He determined the potency and prevision of all the life, and all the adaptations, that ever have emerged or can emerge?

Will it be urged that this one comprehensive law of creative action, with all its methods and potentialities complete in the beginning, must denude history of miracle? must make all things inevitable sequences, and every outcome in nature through all time only what must be, when the moment for its emergence had come? And that therefore the unforeseen would be impossible. I submit that such an inference is not inevitable. The universe becomes one lasting act of the unsearchable but immanent Eternal. The power by which the self-adjusting mechanism of the universe acts, took its rise, and has its continuity, in Him.

A miracle, in its broadest aspect, is a wonderful event; something, which from the known course of phenomena, science could not previse. Science would stultify her past and make impossible her future, if she affirmed that the unprevised and marvellous could not happen. Says Professor Huxley: ‘A miracle, in the sense of a sudden and complete change in the customary order of nature, is intelligible, can be distinctly conceived, implies no contradiction; and therefore, according to Hume’s own showing, cannot be proved false by any demonstrative argument.’[31]

[Footnote 31: Huxley’s _Hume_, p. 133.]

Our knowledge of the observed processes of nature erects no mental barrier to the occurrence of something never before observed. Miracles are not, it is now broadly admitted, dependent on science, but on _evidence_ for their possibility and truth. Nay, more, it is conceivable that, what to us might be profoundly miraculous, might be the outcome of sheer and unmodified natural law.

If we could annul the interval of time between the great minds of the long past and bring them into direct and intelligent contact with the most marked victories of modern research and genius, what would be the effect? Let it be imagined that Aristotle or Plato could stand by while Tyndall demonstrated to them in Athens, that they could hold direct and instant intercourse with a friend in India; or proved to them, that we can demonstrate the actual constituents of the sun and stars, and their physical conditions, with the same certainty as we can determine the analysis of an earthly compound; or bid the sunbeam paint the portrait of a bird or beast in rapid motion; or let them gaze upon the marvellous world of the minute unfolded by the modern microscope; and I do not hesitate to say that if he were the Aristotle or Plato of his own age, standing before these triumphs of this age, he would be standing in the presence of absolute miracles. Yet how have these, to Plato, unforeseen and wonderful events arisen? Only by discovery of, and absolute obedience to, the _laws of nature_ as they are for ever and immutably acting. Man has created nothing, interrupted nothing, violated nothing: he has obeyed; and by obedience conquered.

Then grant that mind, by infinite wisdom and will, gave origin to this ever-unfolding universe, by methods that are all and for ever known to Him, as they can never be known to us, is it according to reason to contend that nothing shall ever happen _even according to the strict methods of natural phenomena_ which past experience has never known?

That will happen, on the assumption of a Creative Mind as the origin of all, which is _needful_, to complete the universe; and what happens need be no interruption, no turning aside, of the course of nature, but only sublime compliance with it.

But more: one of the gravest conflicts of sheer material philosophy with Theism and Theology is, that by mechanical evolution design is swept clean from the universe; that teleology has received its death-blow.

Science finds that phenomena are self-acting, and self-adjusting. The energy is competent; the method is perfect for bringing about the result investigated. Science can find no more; it asks no more; and materialism says, there is no more. There is no design in it; it is, because to be at all, it must be that. There is no design in the form of the river-bed which the mighty waters have engraved for themselves in their irresistible movement down the mountain slope and along the windings of the valley to the sea. It is the result of the force of gravity. Such is the argument.

But while science as such, in strict obedience to its canons, must stop at the self-adjustment of immediate phenomena, and materialism will stop there, the reasoning faculties of the race, as we have seen, will not stop there. They must come at last, by the laws of reason, upon the power and the intelligence by which the methods of nature were made self-acting. Gravitation and the properties of water will account for the perfect adaptation of the river to its bed, and the bed to the purpose of a river. But how came gravity? How came the properties of water? There may be, there is, no direct design in the path of the Amazon or the Danube; but surely there is magnificence in the design that caused the great, the cosmic _methods_ of nature so to co-operate as to cause those rivers inevitably to carve their perfect paths? The dynamics of nature are self-acting up to the very limit of our power of research; but after that, and beyond it, what? Why is the _direction_ of nature’s dynamical methods always and everywhere, through all time and space, beneficent and beautiful?

It is only the design, the teleology, of the old school, touched by the Ithuriel spear of modern knowledge, and changing into a conception of universal design, that can only have originated in an infinite mind.

The ‘law of evolution’ and that of ‘variation and the survival of the fittest’ may, if you will, be held to account for all that narrower knowledge had attributed to direct design. But evolution, like gravitation, is only a method; and the self-adjustments demonstrated in the ‘origin of species’ only make it, to reason, the clearer, that variation and survival is a method that took its origin in mind. It is true that the egg of a moth, and the eye of a dogfish, and the forearm of a tiger _must_ be what they are to accomplish the end of their being. But that only shows, as we shade our mental eyes, and gaze back to the beginning, the magnificence of the design that was _in_volved in nature’s beginning, so as to be _e_volved, by the designed rhythm of nature’s methods.

Whatever matter may be; whatever force is; or whether or not both are the one inseverable product of omnipotent volition; the first affection of matter by force carried with it, potentially, the finished purpose of the All-wise, whatever that may be. Every instance of what such writers as Darwin are obliged to write of as ‘contrivance’ or ‘adaptation’ throughout this universe as it now is, or that shall yet arise in it through all duration, are, and will be, but factors of related harmony in a stupendously vast interlocked ‘mosaic’ of design, which in its entirety has a ‘final purpose’ too great for man to see.

It is admitted by the fullest and farthest thinkers, that the teleological, and the mechanical views, of phenomena and their origin, are not antagonistic. Instead of mutually excluding each other in thought, they are the complement of each other.

To argue, that because we can by analysis and research, discover and demonstrate the physical conditions or antecedents, that, apparently automatically, bring about a manifest contrivance, therefore, we have excluded the possibility of any universal primal design, is a mode of reasoning, the fallacy of which, surely, needs no great logical acumen to lay bare.