Chapter III: Part 3

Because we discover the molecular shapes and movements that determine the structure of a beautiful crystal, it would be surely illogical and unwarranted to say that there was no design, no arrangement in the primary order of things, out of which these very conditions arose. It is conceivable that there may be infinitely more mind in the origination of that which automatically gives rise to a manifest ‘contrivance,’ than in directly originating it.

An ordinary watch is, as a rule, a good timekeeper, under a fixed, say a temperate meridian; but take it to the arctic circle, and it goes too fast; or to the torrid zone, and it goes too slow. But in a chronometer, delicate compensations are made, of a beautiful kind, so contrived as to counteract the thermal changes. Would it be logical to think of the more complex contrivance as devoid of design because it is self-acting?

I grant that there may not be absolute parity of reasoning in the human as compared with the natural instance; but I only desire the reasoning to apply to one essential point. If primarily the methods of nature, which by their rhythmic action automatically produce contrivances, living or otherwise, took their origin in mind, the contrivances so produced were so designed to be produced; and this is contrivance of an infinitely higher order than the self-compensating balance of the chronometer. It is contrivances brought about by arrangements that are infinitely complex, transcending all thought; and which include in their vast sweep, all time, all space, all matter, all motion, and all their relations, from the most inconceivably minute phenomenon to the most stupendous that ever has happened, or can happen, as a product of nature.

We may easily reduce this to a practical form by illustration. The arm or fore-limb of all mammals is constructed essentially on the same type. The forearm of the horse is most highly specialized. In the forearm there is, as in the human skeleton, the _radius_ and the _ulna_. But the ulna has lost its function, and is fused with the radius. What we call the knee in the horse’s fore-limb is really the wrist. There are eight bones in the human wrist. The horse has only seven. Now, immediately succeeding the wrist bones in the human hand, are the five bones that form the palm; and these are followed by the five digits or fingers.

It appears, then, that, unlike the majority of mammal hands, the horse is peculiar. Instead of five bones corresponding to the palm bones, it has only one, which is called the ‘cannon bone;’ and this is followed by but one digit or finger with a huge nail. The horse then walks upon a single finger, viz. the third, on each fore foot and each hind foot. Why is this? and can we discover the history of this modification?

Examine the cannon bone of a horse with care; you will find fixed on either side of it two delicate bones, called ‘splints,’ with actually no mission in the economy of the extant horse.

Now go steadily back in geological time. There are three great geological epochs, the primary, the secondary, and the tertiary. The recent period called the quaternary is a sub-section of the last. Now in the quaternary and upper tertiary, fossil horses are found. They correspond with the horses we see. But in the middle of the tertiary epoch we come upon the horse, not only in Europe, but in India, and above all in America, with the splint bones, that we find in extant horses fixed to the cannon bone, as long as that bone itself, and provided with small spurious or useless hoofs, while the ulna can be traced for its whole length.

In the earliest miocene deposits the horse is found with these spurious or partially aborted toes, no longer useless, but having the full length of the middle toe; making the horse of that epoch a distinctly three-toed creature, and each toe operative; while the forearm is in a condition normal to mammals.

Yet another form, found in America, shows, not only the three distinct and useful toes, but upon the third toe a splint, suggesting a rudiment of the little or fifth finger; while in the oldest of the tertiary rocks has again been found a horse with the fourth finger complete. While finally, in the very earliest tertiary deposits is found a horse with a foot of four perfect digits, consisting of the second, the third, the fourth, and fifth fingers, with a rudiment or splint of the first finger distinctly visible.

Similar facts reveal themselves in relation to the hind feet and legs; and slow variations palpably affected the entire body of the successive types of horse; the teeth, for example, undergoing remarkable successive modifications: and whilst the _Eohippus_ and the _Orohippus_, the last types of horse, discovered respectively in the oldest and later of the eocene beds, possess forty-four teeth, as in a large number of fossil and extant mammalian forms, the recent horse has the number reduced to forty, and their forms remarkably altered, as the final outcome of a succession of modifications.

We have here, then, a series of generic types; for the true relations of which to each other we are indebted to the insight of such workers as Huxley and Marsh and Lartet, and others. They do not afford us illustrations of the minute and scarcely observable modifications which the law of the origin of species involves; they present us rather with a series of family groups; but the relation between them is such as to leave the mind accustomed to biological investigations convinced, that, could we see all the forms that occurred between them, there could be no question as to the origin of these forms, from _eohippus_ of the oldest eocene beds to _equus_ of to-day. Unlike as in a general sense they are, they are progressive modifications, with higher and higher specializations, until, in the extant horse, the highest special modification is attained.

It will harmonize with no dogma of theology, and no doctrine of science, to assume that these equine forms, separated by such enormous epochs of time, were specially created: all accurate knowledge forbids the supposition; while varieties sufficiently marked, such as the race-horse, the giant and powerful dray-horse, the Shetland and the Norman ponies, known to be derived from a common parentage, give the clearest sanction to the inference, that what we now know of the geological history of the horse proves it to be a product of the Darwinian law of evolution; that there has been no total destruction of equine (or any other) life in the great past; but that there has been a continuity of it, borne from region to region, and modified continuously by a thousand changing circumstances. Consequently we find, in the rocky records of the past, that organic types become simpler, and liker to each other, as we trace them through the incomplete geological record to a dim and far off age.

Here, then, we have a series of such generalized types, plainly related to each other in time, leading us down from the horse of historic times to less and less specialized forms of it, as the epoch grows more remote; until in the upper mesozoic or lower eocene beds, we find the progenitor of the line of the equine types we know, to be an animal with a splay foot of five toes, adapted to slow movement in a boggy soil. The slow specialization adapted it to increasing rapidity and ease of movement, and modified states of soil; acting, without doubt, as an increasing protection against its enemies, and providing it with an ever surer means of obtaining abundant and suitable food. And beneficial variation continued to act until the noble horse, beautiful in form, exquisitely graceful in action, and swift as the wind, had been thus created.

Now the most absolutely assured, the most universally accepted truth within the whole realm of human knowledge and experience is the immutability of nature’s laws; and the certainty that their action has been ‘established for ever’ through all space and all time. Great as was the knowledge of ancient and classic peoples, that of which they knew relatively least, was nature. This arose from their inability to perceive the inexpressible vastness of nature, on the one hand, and the detailed constitution of the earth and its universal flora and fauna, on the other. The obvious inference as to the origin of the universe, as they knew it, was, that all that constituted the world and its occupants and inhabitants, mineral, vegetable, and animal, were individual direct creations. But, knowing as we now know, the immutability and universality of the laws of nature, in relation equally to the organic and living as to the inorganic and not-living, and knowing as we do the geological and palæontological history of the earth, and the nature and characteristics of its living inhabitants, it is as manifest as the axioms of geometry, that the direct and supra-natural creation of new species, or even new genera, is absolutely untenable.

Now modern biological science, guided by the splendid genius and ceaseless research of Darwin, and the whole field of biologists, for the past quarter of a century, has been able for all practical purposes to discover and demonstrate a great ‘law’ or method, according to which all the varieties of living ‘species,’ animal and vegetable, have arisen; connecting the remotest ages of the life of the globe with the present flora and fauna in one unbroken continuity, by one unchanging method. The organic history of any individual becomes an analogue of the organic history of the world. The individual begins existence as a minute ovum, and progresses to completeness. The vast series of organic forms, fossil and extant, began in one or more ‘primordial germs.’ The law of all living things, and especially the lowliest, is rapid and abundant reproduction. Variations in individuals so reproduced are as absolutely universal as reproduction itself. It does not require the accurate knowledge of the botanist or the zoologist to discover this. A careful study of any group of living forms, lowly or highly organized, will make this palpable to any observer. The septic organisms, for example, which arise from germs (not those which arise from self-division) constantly vary; and I have been able to make use of this tendency so as to enable three of these wonderful organic and vital specks to slowly change, so as to adapt themselves to changed environments, until, in the course of years, from normally living at a temperature of 60° Fahr. they lived at last, and multiplied enormously, at a temperature of 157° Fahr.; and in the slow process of adaptation, demonstrated fundamental changes were undergone by the organisms.[32]

[Footnote 32: _Journ. Roy. Micro. Soc._ 1887, President’s Address.]

A study of the Desmids, the Diatoms, the Radiolaria, or the Foraminifera amongst minute organisms will show that variations are so constant and so numerous, that the determination of what is called species, is difficult, and at times, impossible.

Who does not know of the varieties that are annually produced from seed-growths of favourite flowering plants?—the pelargonium, the primula, the viola, the rose, and hundreds of others.

That this is not confined to forms under cultivation is equally manifest. Common observation has not noted it perhaps, but there are no fewer than thirteen distinct forms of the common bramble or blackberry, with stem, flower, and fruit sufficiently varied to have induced some botanists to consider them species. Although each when seen is called by the majority of people ‘the wild rose,’ there are at the very least seventeen natural varieties. ‘Artificial selection’ has had no part in these variations and a thousand others that might be named.

Consider the variations constantly arising in fowls, canaries, dogs, and cattle. No litter of kittens is ever precisely alike, or precisely like either parent; and this is true even in human families.

Variation, then, is constant and universal; it acts in all directions and in every living thing. If, amidst the exigencies of the history of an organism, some variation in the progeny is beneficial in altered circumstances, it is by the very nature of things preserved. The offspring of all living organisms are greatly in excess of the number that can reach maturity; and with variations in every organism, and in every part of their organization, for ever occurring; and environments, during great cycles of time, undergoing constant and enormous changes; it is palpable that successive modifications must arise, and through all the countless ages of the past have arisen: resulting always in the ‘survival of the fittest’ or ‘natural selection,’ which ‘signifies the preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious.’[33] This is palpable, for individuals possessed of advantage over others must have the best chance of surviving and multiplying their kind; hence arise ‘varieties,’ ‘races,’ and ‘species;’ and if the enormous age of the period of life upon the globe, and the vicissitudes through which it has passed, be taken into account, it is impossible for a biologist to withhold consent to the fact that a ‘law,’ a method, has been demonstrated, which has been a certain and powerful factor, in producing the variety of the flora and fauna that have filled the earth, from the dawn of life upon the globe, up to the extant animals and vegetables which are the latest outcome of this great law. This is the conviction of all the experts of the world.

[Footnote 33: Darwin’s _Origin of Species_, 6th ed. p. 63.]

That there are other factors of evolution not yet discovered is almost inevitable; they, however, will be but added ‘laws;’ supplementary and co-ordinated methods—giving greater completeness to our knowledge of the origin of species.

But having reached this conclusion, we are at once compelled to ask, What is the origin of this unceasing continuity of variation in all living things? this power to become constantly adapted to change of environment, and for ever, in the fittest form, to survive? Is not this palpably a creative method? Is it not the emergence in time and history of the thought and will of the Creative Power in the beginning?—one of the processes that lay enfolded in the very purpose of the production of heaven and earth, and which as a prevised method only awaited ‘the fulness of time’ to come inevitably into play?

The earth, as is well known, and we have already pointed out, is constantly subject to minute, as well as to smaller cyclic and great secular, changes. Nothing but an ability to become adapted through all duration to current and recurrent changes, could have made a continuity of the living population of the globe possible. We have found the principal ‘law’ of those adaptive changes. But because we have learned the nature of the law or method, by which throughout all time, these changes have been brought about; and because the method _appears_ self-acting like the balance wheel of a chronometer, must we argue that there is no design either in the method or its results? That will not satisfy the constant demands of reason. Finding the law according to which a projectile moves, must not be confounded with the cause of its motion.

‘Natural selection’ cannot originate anything. Variation does not explain itself. Why is it a property of all living things to vary indefinitely and in all directions? The Darwinian law has no existence without it; but that ‘law’ no more accounts for this tendency, than the law of falling bodies explains gravitation, or shows why it acts as it does.

It is easy to explain the law of the compensations of a chronometer balance, or a compensating clock pendulum; but that does not account for their existence.

The law of ‘inheritance,’ the likeness of progeny to parents, is, like the law of variation, universal. But why is it so? If it were not so, there could be no survival of the fittest. Yet it is no more explained by the discovery of that law, than the nature of that which thinks, is explained by a discovery of the laws of thought.

Selection implies alternatives to select from. The splendid organic mechanism of all the animals of the earth, with their perfect relations to their sphere, could as a whole, only have been brought about by means that started for, and led to, that goal. ‘The law by which structures originate is one thing; those by which they are restricted, directed, or destroyed is another.’[34]

[Footnote 34: _Origin of the Fittest_, by E. D. Cope, p. 225.]

Then, because the horse becomes specialized and adapted to its circumstances in a remarkable manner, leaving evidence in the rocks of long severed but successive epochs, of the very manner in which it was created as we know it; and because we have proof that this method is practically self-acting, shall we stultify reason by assuming that in its self-action there is no design? that as a great rhythmic law it had no origin? that, because to our powers of observation it is automatic, it explains its own existence? or that it strips the mind, by this very automatism, of any necessity for, or right of, having its origin explained? None of these assumptions are congruous; they surely violate the fundamental principles of thought.

We may be enabled no longer to say of any structure that it is a ‘final cause;’ our insight is not deep enough for that; but an equally powerful weapon in defence of theism takes its place: I designate it ‘CONCURRENT ADAPTATION;’ that is, _fitness_, for ever, throughout all time and all space; and fitness absolutely constant amidst all changes. Adaptation is universally concurrent with existence; and whether we have to account for it by sudden and unexplained action, or by the slow operation of laws, is a matter of no essential moment: _it is there_.

Nothing, for example, can be more certain, than the powerful influence exerted on the coloration and morphology of flowers, all over the earth, by the visits of insects. The insects assiduously visit flowers for food, or nectar; and by their visits the pollen of one flower is carried to the stigmatic surface of another: so effecting cross fertilization. The contrivances for making insect agency efficient, are so numerous, so palpable, and so exquisitely perfect as to entrance the observer. One flower has its nectar in a tube, to reach which the proboscis of the visiting insect must touch and split a delicate tissue and expose the moist adhesive surfaces of a couple of pollen masses, which adhere to and are carried away by the insect, in such a position that, in visiting another flower of the same species, it must deposit the pollen where alone it can do its fertilizing work.

Another flower is so contrived, that to reach the nectar, the visiting insect must touch a sensitive surface causing the rupture of a tissue, which confines a pollen mass; but, on the rupture of the tissue, this flies out like an arrow at the unbidden guest; and an adhesive end sticks to the insect, which is startled away; but, visiting another flower of a like kind, deposits, in the right place, the fertilizing pollen it unconsciously carries.

Another flower has an ingenious arrangement by which it lures an insect into its corolla, and then imprisons it, provided with plenty of food, until its anthers are ripe, when it sheds their pollen over the insect; after which, by a special organic arrangement, it opens the prison door and lets its visitor emerge, charged with pollen, to visit another similar flower, which will inevitably be in a condition to receive fertilization from its pollen-covered body.

Thousands of other instances might be given.

Now we know perfectly the mutability of flowers. It is highly probable that the visiting insect and the visited flower were wholly unlike, in some instances, what they now are, twenty thousand years ago; and it is equally improbable that they will be what they now are, twenty thousand years hence. But that which this great biological law affirms, is, that whatever the changes, and however brought about, past or future, there never has been, there is not, and there never will be, an instant’s cessation of concurrent adaptation:—the operation of the ‘law’ that secures to all that lives adjustment to its environments. That surely must be a method that took its origin in mind; and it must have had its prevised and preordered place potentially assigned, from the earliest creative movement; as it must continue to have unceasing action to the very terminus of all organic existence.

Design, purpose, intention, appear, then, when all the facts of the universe are studied in the light of all our reasoning faculties, to be ineradicable from our view of the creation. Teleology does not now depend for its existence on Paleyean ‘instances;’ but all the universe, its whole progress in time and space, is one majestic evidence of teleology. The will and purpose running through it are as incapable of being shut out of our consciousness and reasoning faculties, as its phenomena and their modes are of being rendered wholly imperceptible by our senses.

A ‘mind’ that is not a mind, in any sense as we know it, is, to us, nothing. Will, to be will, to us, must be such as we know of; though it be infinite. Intelligence that is infinite cannot cease to be intelligence. To an infinite intelligence, as to us, in the same conditions, the properties of conic sections must be what we know them to be. But an Infinite Mind would differ absolutely from ours in that there could be nothing tentative, nothing experimental in its methods, through all time and space. Only the right means would ever be employed, or the right ends ever be brought about. But, surely, even an Infinite will, in the realm of matter, must _use_ means. When human power takes a pebble from a great height and places it at the sea-level it has only done what gravity could have done. But when human will by continuity of purpose combines materials to form a calculating machine, we have an evidence of the action of mind; something, which, while it is made and exists by the very laws of nature, yet the laws of nature could not, by themselves, have made.

Similar results must be due, then, to similar conditions. The teleology, that is the inseverable motive, as it were, of all the activities and interactions of nature, must be the product of mind.

Then was _man_, as a physical being, the terminal link in the great progressive chain of living forms that had peopled the earth through countless ages? Or does he, in physical origin, stand apart? Is he a being from whose existence a new creative epoch dates? Or is he the final product of the vast ancestral line of life that ran through all the ages? Did God make man ‘of the dust of the ground’ by some process of which we can form no conception, and can discover no trace? Or is there evidence that the Creator made man of the dust of the ground by majestic laws, acting over vast epochs, until he had become meet for the inbreathing of a higher nature?

That is a question of profoundest interest. But if the authoritative and final demonstration were given either way to-morrow, we, in ourselves, should remain unaltered. We should be conscious of no uplifting and of no fall. Immediate or mediate creation, if God be the author, must be alike Divine. To fear the consequences of honest truth seeking research on this momentous question, is to manifest little love of truth for its own sake, on the one hand; and little stalwartness of personal conviction, as to the security of the foundation of professed beliefs, on the other. Whether we will or not, the whole matter will be searched to its deepest depths. But amidst all the conflict of opinion as to details, in one thing all are agreed, and that is, that the gulf between man and the noblest apes is such as to be practically without comparison. Whatever science may be able to show ultimately as to the relation of man to the anthropoid apes, there is to-day no biologically demonstrated and direct kinship. That the anthropoid apes, as we know them, were in any proper sense the _direct_ ancestors of man, is not a serious contention of even extreme evolutionists. The facts before us do not justify it. The highest ape is still an ape; and whilst the oldest human remains, such as the Eugis and Neanderthal skulls, discovered in association with evidences of immense antiquity, have remarkable characteristics, pointing in some respects in the direction of the great apes, they are still the crania of men. After a critical and exhaustive examination of the two skulls above referred to, Professor Huxley says concerning the Eugis skull: ‘Its measurements agree equally well with those of some European skulls. And assuredly there is no mark of degradation about any part of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.’[35] And in summing up the results of an equally critical examination of the far more remarkable Neanderthal skull, the same unquestionable authority says: ‘In no sense, then, can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a human being intermediate between men and apes. At most they demonstrate the existence of a _man_ whose skull may be said to revert somewhat towards the pithecoid type.... And indeed, though truly the most pithecoid of known human skulls, the Neanderthal cranium is by no means so isolated as it appears to be at first, but forms in reality the extreme term of a series leading gradually from it to the highest and best developed of human crania.’[36] Nothing has arisen to seriously modify these authoritative statements. No thorough anatomist practically familiar with the structure of the anthropoids on the one side, and man on the other, could attempt to argue that man can be directly a descendant of chimpanzee, gorilla, or orang. ‘I may say,’ says Huxley, ‘that the fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which he has probably become what he is.’[37]

[Footnote 35: _Man’s Place in Nature_, Huxley, p. 157.]

[Footnote 36: _Man’s Place in Nature_, Huxley, p. 157.]

[Footnote 37: _Ibid._ p. 159.]

But let us beware of mistaking, or even distorting, the true meaning of this, as understood by the philosophical evolutionist. It does not for a moment place the physical nature of man outside the range of the great creative law of natural selection. No arrangement of the monkeys can present us with a rational order of development, of which man is physically the latest and highest outcome. But the precursor of man, of whose actual existence no direct proof has yet arisen, is assumed, on the evidence of absolutely innumerable details, the full value of which is only to be clearly seen by experts, to have ascended, not from any anthropoid,—chimpanzee, gorilla, nor orang,—but these apes are found to form the nearest branch existing, produced by the same trunk, out of which, physically, man’s nature was, by the law of descent, evolved.

That the embryological and anatomical resemblances between man and the highest apes are of a profound and striking character, no sane educated man would attempt to traverse; and that this involves close biological relationship, and proves the operation on each, of the same organic laws of development, so far as physical origin is concerned, is also certain.

That there are evidences of an antiquity of the human race, as such, immensely disproportionate to that indicated in the absolutely unreliable and useless ‘received’ chronologies, it would be folly to doubt and immorality to neglect. It is evidenced by man’s works, which are shown, without question, to be of indefinitely vast antiquity; and correspond, in the main, with the works of races of men still living. It is shown by the enormous antiquity of races of men as we know them; by the vast age of languages, made evident, by a deep analysis of their structure, as sister and parent languages; as well as by the great age of even human remains.

Now all this, taken in connection with the anatomical structure and embryological development of man, makes it impossible to suppose that man’s physical nature was not a product of the same great creative laws, the same vital processes, as those that gave origin to the chimpanzee or the gorilla; a slow creation, through a long line of varied life, from ‘the dust of the ground,’ the elements of the earth. There is in this relation an almost marvellous insight in David’s song:—

‘I will give thanks unto Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Wonderful are Thy works;
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My frame was not hidden from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
Thine eyes did see mine unperfect substance;
And in Thy book were all my members written,
Which day by day were fashioned,
When as yet there was none of them.’[38]

[Footnote 38: Ps. cxxxix. vers. 14-16.]

By what link man is united physically to the great series below him, by what line and in what specific manner he arose, it has not yet been given to science to determine. Biological science sees, with inevitable certainty, that he must have been in vital union with that series; that physically he is a part of the majestic organic whole, from the first dawn of life upon the globe until now.

At the same time it is equally certain that other agencies which could not have acted on ape or other mammal, nor indeed on any other living form besides, came into operation, when man, as such, became an inhabitant of this earth.

Nor is it by any means other than conceivable that science, which has transformed the face of the world in fifty years, may be able to demonstrate the actual physical line of man’s origin. But if that be so, if the line along which man’s physical nature was moulded of the dust of the ground, by the Creative Mind and will, were made so plain that none could refuse the evidence, it may leave undisturbed our mental peace, and unaltered our conviction of the dignity and majesty of man. It would leave our responsibilities undiminished, our rights uninfringed, and our hopes unclouded.

The saint is none the less saintly, because he is ancestrally the last, and prevised outcome, of an inconceivably grand progression of creative laws, operating through countless cycles, than he would have been, as the descendant of a man produced by an isolated act of creation. The song of the nightingale is no iota less rich in fluent melody because its larynx was modified from less melodious forms; and the martyrdom of Paul, or the noble sacrifices of heroes and reformers to secure the sacred rights of liberty and truth for their fellow-men, are none the less exalted because we must trace their ancestry to the slow operation of creative laws, which in the great unbroken stream of life upon the earth gave origin to the monod, the coral-polyp, the mollusc, the lizard, the aye-aye, and the chimpanzee. Verily, if the researches of science demonstrate that this was the method of creative action, we may not murmur.

The sovereignty of man does not depend on a particular view of the exact manner in which the Creator caused the elements of the earth to produce his frame. ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground;’ it is not _how_ He so formed him. None has power to affirm or to deny how, unless with reverent hands he find it written in the rocks, or woven indelibly with the very structure of man himself. It is because men have interpreted, without evidence, the stages of creative action, and welded these non-essentials with iron girdles of dogma, that faith has again and again been imperilled.

The true crown of manhood, the final majesty and exalted mystery of creative power, was not man’s _body_, but his soul. ‘And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul,’ is the expression of that which gives his unshared dignity to man.

What is meant by this, who shall explain? Who can peer into the depths of a mystery so profound? It defies all our powers of search; dare we make a special interpretation or understanding of how this was brought about, an essential of belief? Is it not enough that it was the supreme, as it was, so far as our present knowledge will carry us, the final outcome of creation?

When the Creative Power and wisdom had built man’s physical nature of the dust of the ground, whether suddenly or slowly, by this method or by that, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul. It was the possession of what we call the soul that gave to the manhood its being. How this was imparted, who can know? who shall explain? Even if the very _method_ be at last discovered, or approximated, the unalterable question must remain, _why_ the method, the law, brought about so sublime a result, and from whence came the conditions that made the laws direct themselves to such an exalted end. In fine, how physical laws could so be caused to act as to give origin to consciousness, thought, and moral faculties. Plainly, this ‘end’ must have lain in the Divine ‘beginning;’ and we must go behind and below the mechanics of phenomena and explain their _vera causa_; we must find our way above matter not-living in the great past, and fathom the very essence of the cause that made it live, before we can attempt to explain the origin of that self in man which looks upon and _knows itself_. We have seen that matter and force will not, as sole factors, lend themselves to a philosophy of the origin and explanation of this. A linear arrangement of the ascending mentality of brutes does not really explain, or even minimize, the difficulties of the problem. It simply makes the area of the problem the wider.

‘I am,’ ‘I can,’ ‘I ought,’ ‘I think,’ with equal freedom—of an atom or a universe, of a rosebud or a Deity, of myself or of my race, of the grandeur of right and the baseness of wrong—these are the impenetrable mysteries which no property known to us in matter, and no process ever seen by us in matter and force, can ever _explain_.

No doubt the most profound and active minds amongst men will always endeavour to correlate the access even of mind, with modifications of cerebral and neural matter. But if that be approximately done, the real problem will remain simply untouched. True, we can afford no better explanations than those which philosophy offers; but we may not blind ourselves to the true value of these. Mind is inseverably associated with neural matter; we do not know, and cannot even think of it, as emerging as a product of neural matter. We must distinguish clearly between scientific evidence and plausibilities of a philosophical kind expressed in scientific language. We shall be fascinated again and again with a brilliant intellectual arrangement of things known, with things guessed, leading to hypothetical ‘interpretations’ of the most impenetrable mysteries. But the fact remains, that the activities of intellect are inexpressible in terms of matter and motion. Mind only can give origin to mind. Until it is congruous to think that parallel lines can enclose a space, that 2+2=7, that out of nothing something can come, it will be incongruous, in spite of subtle and ceaseless effort, to construct hypotheses by which _y_ shall by its own act change into _x_, or, in other words, by which mind, with its absolute disparity to matter, shall come forth as an unaided and necessary product of matter as affected by motion.

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