occurs no change in consciousness that is unaccompanied by some action of this organ; and it is moreover supposed that in many cases such action leaves behind it some slight alteration in the structure or composition of the brain itself, whereby it is rendered more fit for that very action. I know not whether it be so, but Habit, which lies at the basis of all individual progress, has been explained as a growth of this description. How simple a thing was nutrition to our forefathers! We fed this body, we stuffed these pipes of ours, and there an end. No doubt the body could not do its work without food. We were satisfied with understanding this truth, and giving it the necessary supply. But modern science has pushed its curiosity beyond this. It has watched the course of this nutrition, taken note of the why it was wanted, seen the tissue waste and disintegrate in its very functions, seen it hold its permanence in a perpetual transmutation. I need not enter into details; how far the physiologist has been able to trace a specific function to the several parts of the nervous and cerebral system,-which are thus perpetually being destroyed and restored, is known to every reader of these papers. But observe the sort of revolution in our thinking that has taken place. It was always recognised that we wanted the material outside world as the common instructor of us all, the common object of · our knowledge. When we speak of true or false in the events of life, or the theories of science, it is tacitly understood that, while there are millions of minds, there is but one real world from which they all draw their knowledge. Two men differ in their measurement of Chimborazo. Let them go and measure it again, and yet again, till they both agree. Chimborazo stands there, impartial umpire. General assent is perhaps your synonym for truth, but how is general assent obtained or preserved, unless by the teaching of one great instructor? Now, in these modern times, this outside world, this environment we live in, is also recognised as taking its part-through this process of nutrition-in building up the learner himself, building up tissues that seem to feel; seem For here comes in the question, often so angrily discussed amongst us, whether the psychical properties which constitute consciousness are properties of the old substance we called matter, or whether properties so novel do not imply an altogether new substance or entity, we call spirit? A question difficult to decide. Indeed I am more impressed with the difficulty, than with the extreme importance of the question, which does not appear to me to be quite of that momentous nature which our controversies assume it to be. For say there is this separate substance, called spirit, what have we before us in man? A new organization, a new whole, composed of this spirit and the vital frame. And in this new whole only is the spirit found, whose first office and manifestation is the knowing this body and what immediately surrounds it. This new individuality, Man, is like every other individuality in nature-a complexity, a whole composed of parts, whose unity consists in some harmony of forces or properties. Amongst the speculative thinkers of Greece and Rome, and amongst the early fathers of the Church, it was the prevailing opinion that the soul was a kind of ethereal matter. With this species of dualism we need not now concern ourselves. Matter has grown so ethereal under the investigations and theories of modern science that the imagination toils in vain to represent what are nevertheless described as physical agents. That ether whose pulsations are light for us, presents a subtlety we cannot go beyond, for we strive in vain to apprehend it. If mere tenuity and refinement is what the imagination seeks, we find these sufficiently amongst declared physical phenomena. The speculative thinker, however, wanted more than refinement, he wanted for his new substance permanence; he wanted a one permanent substance which he could call himself, and which, existing through all surrounding changes, might exist, itself unchanged, even in other worlds. He seems slowly to have convinced himself that this something permanent could not be any form of matter which is always in movement, decomposing and recomposing, and he devised the unextended substance; spirit stood out in clear contrast to matter. Who, indeed, first introduced this form of dualism, what Eastern or Western sage, I know not. It is, perhaps, as old as philosophy itself. But it was not the popular philosophy of Europe, so historians write, till the time of Descartes, who had much to do in giving it shape and currency. This dualism has always held its ground in defiance of notorious difficulties. I need hardly mention them. How is motion, it is asked, of the extended substance to affect the unextended? And that motion of a mechanical or molecular kind is connected with feeling, and feeling again with motion, is surely an indisputable fact. We all know how Leibnitz contrived his "pre-established harmony" to escape from this difficulty, and we all know that the result of his pre-established harmony was to make the difficulty more prominent than ever. Men admired the ingenious contrivance, but only thought the more of the perplexity from which it was intended to relieve them. But the difficulties are not all on one side. For instance, it is the law of physics that contact of moving matter produces motion. Now in the brain there must be a point where motion no longer produces motion, but feeling. How can we reconcile this with our law of physies? The brain, as material substance, is under the laws of motion, and must respond to impulse-by motion and by all the motion due to that impulse. There is no room for any other effect. To say that sensation is a transmuted force is simply to say that there comes in a new quality, which bears, or may bear, in its degree, some correspondence with the mechanical force of motion for which it is substituted. But the substitution remains. At a certain moment matter no longer responds to motion by motion, but by feeling. What has become of our laws of motion? It is true that in the phenomena of vital movement we may be said to have already departed from the laws of physics, for here a movement ensues which appears to have little or no correspondence with the impulse which prompts it. But here the physicist, with his still half-understood laws of electricity and galvanism, may make his protest-file a sort of ne exeat regno, till the case is decided. That there is this New Becoming is the great and indisputable fact; marvellous, as indeed every Becoming has been and is. A sharper distinction there is not in all nature than that between motion and sensibility. There is no possibility of confounding them, nor does one slide into the other. The utmost rapidity of motion cannot be conceived as approximating to feeling by reason of its rapidity. Sensation is as distinct from motion, as motion from rest. But this New Becoming makes its appearance in a vital frame, full of its own peculiar movements. Now do you ask, What feels? Not surely that vital frame minus its feeling. As moving-thing, or as spaceoccupant, it does not feel. The only answer open to us is that this concrete made up of motion and of feeling-feels. The answer looks at first like a mere subterfuge, but it is the answer with which we are obliged to content ourselves in all similar cases. What moves ? Not the space-occupant merely as such. You add the very property of motion to the space-occupant, and then say it moves. What thinks? Not a moving or vitalized body. You add the property of thought, and then say, the man thinks. A new whole, a new individuality has entered into the world. To ask for its origin is to approach the problem of creation, or to view matter as organizing itself, or as developing still new properties. Cause in Science is the series, is the order; Cause in Metaphysics is the origin of the series or order. Science is perfectly right in limiting itself to its own Causation. But all that it teaches only stimulates us the more to ask what it is that develops the series, the order, the organizations ever advancing, as it seems, in their nature. It may be deemed but a poor account to give of our individuality, or personal being, that it is just this new whole that moves, and grows, and thinks. But if you would extend this account you must be prepared to answer the question, What is the origin of the whole world as it develops itself in space and in time, in physical and in psychical properties? And accordingly there are not wanting those who say that their Ego itself rests on the Omnipotent. What is it that resists us in the simplest stone, or merest clod, we strike our foot against? It is some aggregate of atoms held together by a force of coherence, and which we further describe by this very resistance. In the clod of earth stands and grows a living plant. Its very materials are gathered from the soil and the air, by the aid of the inconceivably rapid movements of heat and light. Do you ask, What grows and lives? We say it is the plant, and we define the plant by this very life and growth. To atoms and their chemistry was added that by means of which a new whole, the living plant, came into existence. Up to the plant walks the animal, and grazes on it. This creature grows, and feels, and moves spontaneously. What feels? Just this animal which we describe by many properties, and last and chiefly, by this very property of feeling. Such property had stolen into the world, and manifested itself there, and formed that new concrete or whole which we call the sensitive animal. There is no other answer. And if you ask, What thinks? It is man, another organism into which this property has entered, greatest of properties yet known, and known as part of this new whole. At every stage we have a new organization, or individuality, composed of old and new. Whence came the new? Whence came the old? This is the problem of creation. What moves? admits but of one answer. It is this very compound of space-occupancy and motion. What introduced motion into the universe is another question. What thinks? It is this very creature who lives, and moves, and feels, and also thinks. What introduced thought into the universe, and so constructed this new individuality? That is another question. This incessant becoming, how are we to deal with it? Am I to accept it as an ultimate fact, like being itself; for indeed every being (in the form it wears to us) was also a becoming? Am I to devise an “unknowable cause," and attribute to it our evolving series? Or may I not advance at once to the supposition that this evolving whole we have before us existed as a thought before it existed in space, or as an actuality? May I not leap at once to this supposition, and deduce what I can from it? What has been determines what is, and both together what will be. But if the past determines the future, does not that whole that is to be determine every part of the series? And how can this be conceived but on the supposition that the whole pre-existed in thought? On the great subject of the creation of the world the wisest, we are told, are the most reticent. One feels it almost a presumption to discuss it at all. And what says Matthew Arnold in one of his terse, melodious, and thoughtful verses ?— "Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb, And wait to see the future come." A mere soldier of the rank and file would venture to suggest to those who have a certain repugnance to the term, or the idea of creation, that an evolution that results in ever new individualities would be no bad definition of creation. And such an evolution makes itself known to us. No justice could be done to the religious problem without some preparatory study of man in his social and emotional aspects. And our present concern was to determine what philosophical writers often call a stand-point. Ours cannot be the individual man; but the great cosmos in which he appears—so much of it as we can embrace. We are accustomed to say that we proceed from the simple to the complex, and from the lower to the higher. But the simplest to which we can descend is still a complexity, and in proceeding from the lower to the higher we confessedly indicate an order only of development, we do not say that the lower actually produces the higher. Either the whole development is to be accepted as one absolute fact, or we make attempt to pass on to the developing power and intelligence. But always it must be our endeavour to study the individual as part of the whole cosmos, so far as that is revealed to us. We are confessedly in the region of philosophy or speculative thought, where it would be unbecoming to dogmatize. For myself, this obstinate conception occurs again and again, that the whole, as it develops, and will be developed, in space and time, determined all the parts of that whole-which it could only do on the supposition that it pre-existed in thought, the thought, therefore, of some Being capable of so thinking and so acting,—not thinking or acting as a human being. I find this conviction even stronger in me than that which demands some one permanent being (conscious or unconscious) as mere cause of all this Becoming we witness; though the two lines of thought may easily be harmonized. But whatever conception we strive to form of this speculative nature, it is indisputable fact that matter exists nowhere for us but as organized; it rises before us as ordered the expression of reason as we think. It is ever a whole, and ever a becoming. Need I add that we know only a small portion of that whole, even as hitherto developed, and must make up our cosmos of the very little we do know. WILLIAM SMITH. |