As To Ourselves

( Originally Published 1909 )

SO far in our discussion of the problems of Life, we have not often gone beyond the province of a botanist or of a naturalist. All that we have said might have its illustrations in the life of a cactus, of a parrot, or of an antelope, because it is only life which we have been investigating, and anything living illustrates life. But all along the way there looms up as its termination and end that which dwarfs everything else, and which was termed by Huxley the Andes of Life—Man.* Until the road reaches the base of this great mountain range, our interest in it is not very exciting. We have been gathering just so much scientific information and no more. But so soon as we find that the trend is towards a scientific demonstration of the origin of Man himself, our mental attitude immediately changes. It is now we ourselves who are personally involved in the discussion, and none the less so because we are not to consider man from a metaphysical or philosophical or theological standpoint, but only as science must regard him.

But even then we feel that nothing which we have already passed quite prepares us for this task, because not only lofty heights, but also profound depths lie before us, if Man is to be accounted for. He is the problem of problems, every proposed explanation of which proves to be very incomplete. It is all very well to follow life unicellular to life multicellular, and then from forms now living to those long extinct, whose remains in the earth's rocky cemeteries show how all came by continuous descent from primitive metazoa but then what are We who are making this review?

Unhappily we are not like scientific beings from another world, visiting this planet to study its vital phenomena, but we are ourselves part and parcel of that which we are investigating. To say the least, this fact is curious, and naturally suggests the question whether after all we are really of this earth or only by some chance on it. Certainly this earth has no other self-examining species.

But before attempting any great ascent, much preliminary work is necessary, and so here, following as we should along the lines of the physical conditions entering into the life of man, we begin with his bodily senses. It is by them that he comes into relation with his physical world, because they afford the only means by which at first he can do so. He is an inner centric self with the whole world outside of him, and so that world would remain but for these special sense organs, which, it should be particularly noted, are on one side so wholly physical that we can examine them with scalpel and microscope, but they connect at the other end with what is anything but physical, being in-stead wholly psychical. It is not the physical eye, but only the man himself which sees, though without the eye he could not see at all. Tiere, then, just where each bodily sense reaches his consciousness, is the man himself. This is where he is at home, and if we can only make his acquaintance in those private quarters, we will learn more about him than we can anywhere else. Both meta-physics and philosophy have filled the world with outside talk about Man, but for trustworthy information give us the testimony of his five bodily senses.

Thus, beginning with the sense of Taste, the lowest of human senses, since its chief function is to serve bodily nutrition, we find illustrated even here that generic dissatisfaction in man with narrow limitations. This impatience with limitations is our first private information about man, and we are never going to hear the last of it. For though the ass knoweth his master's crib and is satisfied with its healthy but monotonous diet, at a man's banquet, where his range of taste is illustrated, the air above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth are all called upon to furnish things for that table. The commerce of the world draws largely upon the products of every clime and region of the globe to supply what men like to taste. He would be well versed in geography who could tell where every article came from on the table of one of our ordinary mechanics. But the creature at the crib has quite a sufficient reason for being content with his unvarying food, namely, because he is an ass!

But the same discontent with what he has got Man shows with all his other senses. None of them come up to what he requires of them. The other animals, all of whom have the same sense organs that he has, find these perfectly satisfactory for all their wants, but man finds his to be such poor instruments for him that he has to supplement the most important of them with devices of his own making. For he demands of his bodily senses what no other creature would think of asking : things to be seen which no eye was ever made to see, nor ear to hear, nor touch to feel. Finally, in his insatiable quest for information he parts company with his sense organs altogether, with the result, as we shall see, of incalculable additions to his knowledge.

All this is particularly well illustrated in the case of the Eye, for we may here appropriately quote the remarks of its most distinguished scientific investigator, Hermann von Helmholtz,* who says, p. 201: " Of all our members, the eye has always been held the choicest gift of Nature the most marvellous product of her plastic force. Poets and orators have celebrated its praises; philosophers have extolled it as a crowning instance of perfection in an organism, and opticians have tried to imitate it as an unsurpassed model."

But after enumerating the many features of its mechanisms with their explanations, he proceeds, p. 219: " Now it is not too much to say that if an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which had all these defects, I should think myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms and giving him back his instrument. Of course I shall not do this with my eyes, and shall be only too glad to keep them as long as I can defects and all. Still, the fact that however bad they may be, I can get no others, does not at all diminish their defects."

Helmholtz is here speaking of the eye only as an optical instrument used for the ordinary purposes of life, and for these he finds it abounding in deficiencies. He does not allude at all to its utter inadequacy as a help for us to go beyond our customary world. But ordinarily no one's eye recognizes anything clearly within eight, and with many, ten, inches of his eyeball. What is there to see within that distance? Not until a microscope was made could any one tell. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that this artificial supplement to the eye ever magnifies anything. When we cross a street in order to read a sign we have not magnified its letters by doing so. We have simply brought our eyes nearer to them. And that is all that a microscope does. A three-inch glass brings our eyes to that distance of the object we are looking at. An inch and a half glass brings us so much nearer, and if then with a direct illumination we look at the centre of a common verbena flower, strings upon strings of more gorgeously colored pearls than any jeweller can show, appear to our admiring gaze. All this shows that the eyes which we brought with us at birth do not see a tithe of the beauties of Nature. With a microscope not much better than this, Leeuwenhoek, in 1675, frightened the world by saying that more animals live in our mouths than there were people in Holland! But with object glasses of higher powers we are said to see things magnified 200, 500, 1,000, or 2,000 diameters, which only means that different objectives, as they are called, bring our eyes within 1-4, or 1-8, or 1-12, or 1-15, or 1-25 of an inch of the object.

And what have these mechanical devices of ours for helping our eyes to see, not done for the human world? So important to all life is that living world about which our native eyes would never have given us the least information, that it is evident that no physical instrument can suffice for man, because he is so much greater than anything physical. All eyes made of protoplasm, including the eyes of the anthropoid apes, belong only to low origins and levels, but this mineral made microscope belongs to the Andean heights of Mind.

However, we have still other reasons for dissatisfaction with our eyes. They see Canopus, the second brightest star in the heavens, as no larger than a bright jewel in a lady's necklace, though we know that since that star has no proper motion, as astronomers say, it must be immeasurably distant, and for it then to shine so splendidly, it is very probably more than a hundred thousand times larger and a hundred thousand times brighter than our own sun. But our poor eye can now answer: You know that I do not report the exact truth to you about anything. You should not trust me so, because, owing to radical defects in my make-up, I tell you that a man six feet high is only six inches high when he is a mile off. And as to the stars, you have had to make a telescope to help me out, but even with its aid the fixed stars remain beyond me, for I then see them as merely shining points. It is not by me, but by that greater power than mine in you, your Reason, that you learn not only how large Canopus is, but also by another of your contrivances, that Canopus abounds in earthly materials.

We must leave for the present, other important lessons from the serious imperfections of this sense organ, to take up the Ear, only mentioning what is the most important fact of all, viz., that it is not the faculty of sight itself which is imperfect in us, but solely the instrument of that faculty which is so. If the faculty itself were deficient, we could not ourselves help it with anything, whether telescope or microscope, any more than we could help a man who had never learned to read, by giving him a pair of spectacles. The faculty belongs to us and not to our eyes, nor to our brains either, as we shall find further on.

The Ear is worse off than the eye in the narrowness of the range of the medium through which it catches sounds. While the eye responds to the vibrations of light which travel 188,000 miles a second, the vibrations of sound travel only 1,100 feet a second. Sounds, therefore, soon die away in the distance, nor can a thousand voices singing together go much farther than one voice does, the same as, if instead of singing the crowd were throwing stones, but a few of the stones would go beyond the average distance of the rest. Nevertheless, the ear possesses certain intrinsic advantages over the eye. Instead of the constantly mistaken information which the eye gives, the ear is always accurate and truthful. Hence it was a great advance in medicine to enlist its aid in auscultation. It fails in our species only in its report of the direction of sounds, because for that purpose we have no movable external ears such as those of the rabbits and the equines. Unlike the eye, which chiefly informs the mind, the ear stirs the emotions. We can see a fish writhing in its death agony without pity, but no one can so listen to an animal's shrieks of pain. This is as it should be, for however wrong the head, the heart should keep right. The ear also is in-tensely personal. It makes. no mistakes about the identity of the voice it hears. Once, on the deck of a Glasgow steamer, I parted from a student friend, and we did not meet again for thirty-three years. I could never have known him then by sight, for time sadly spoils eye memories, but his voice told me who he was the moment he spoke. All such facts reveal why through the ear the profoundest depths of being are reached, because for some persons Music, instead of being only sounds proceeding from tongue, lips, or instruments, is to them the speech itself of the innermost soul. Beethoven composed some of his finest symphonies after he had become stone-deaf.

Nor has that great being who is back of each sense organ failed to remedy the deficiencies of the ear even more wondrously than those of the eye. I was once told that a gentleman wished to speak to me, and on my asking what he wanted his voice trembled as he said that his child had pneumonia. As his physician was with him we three then alternately spoke, and though they were hundreds of miles away, I could distinguish their different voices as readily as if we were actually together. It was by means of an electrified wire that the ear heard personal voice and tone transmitted a thousand times farther and faster than waves of air could vibrate. But what is that marvel compared with wireless telephony? Here is man bidding that mysterious ether which pervades the whole universe to become a human voice speaking to a human ear!

But far and away the Queen of our senses, and higher in rank than eye or ear, is our sense of Touch, because it is the only one of our senses which endows us with entirely new capacities. Yet it is so only in the human being, because in him alone can it do what it does in raising Man to the rank of a true Creator, or one who gives origin to things which would not exist but for his intelligent purpose and design. With these new capacities we can do what we please with anything physical on this physical earth. Thus a large audience may be spellbound by a famous violinist who seems to make his instrument sweetly talk. It all then looks so easy. He has no more fingers than I have, but if I should take that instrument in hand it would utter nothing but lamentable squeaks. So another musician commands a high price for each night's performance on the piano, because he has acquired such a marvellous touch of its keys. But Civilization is out with her greatest shows on this occasion. The women there are simply indescribable for what they display in dress and ornament, and yet not an item of either would be procurable but for skilled handicraft. So the great hall itself and everything in it, whether for use or for embellishment, has been made by skilled handicraft.

But what is skilled handicraft? It is that which produces work according to a special training in each case of the sense of touch. It is not the eye which can make a microscope, nor the ear a trumpet. Practically it is the insensate hand made intelligent and guided by a human personality which suffices for everything. With a human personality, the sense of touch can take the place of the seeing of the eye and of the hearing of the ear, when these can no longer do either. Helen Keller lost in infancy every seeing and hearing brain cell, but by the sense of touch she has become a highly educated woman, versed in the literatures of ancient and of modern languages, and an accomplished authoress as well.

Yet the sense Of touch itself does not count, since a number of animals have a more sensitive touch than we have, but this delicate feeling in them falls so far short of reaching a human consciousness, that were all animals to unite in the attempt, they would still fail to make one ordinary pin. Without the human mind there can be no handicraft.

It is this bodily sense activating the hand which most reveals what man is and what he can do, for as the ancients said, feeling reaches the heart of being. In comparison, matter now sinks to insignificance. Like all other senses, touch ascends to the brain by its afferent nerves and reaches there that Great Reality which by its efferent nerves tells the human hand to turn and deal with the properties and the forces of matter as it wills. Thus one can now take passage from the New York Central Depot, and in twenty minutes pass through seven miles of the subway which runs under the streets of two cities and under a river on which great steamers ply. Matter enough had to be handled ere the way was finished, but the designer decreed beforehand how every shovelful was to be removed. Also the marvellous bridge which spans the river overhead existed down to its last wire and bolt, in the mind of the great engineer who planned it before any part of it existed on earth. But we need not go on, for the whole earth is filled with the glory of man by his handiwork.

To some all this sounds trite enough, because everybody knows that man has a wonderful mind. But just because every one knows this, the important scientific aspect of the subject is overlooked altogether. For as Science rates other animals according both to their bodily structure and their degree of intelligence, so she should scientifically account for the whole of man, for his mind no less than for his body. Science might as well limit her observations to his skin as to neglect explaining how, on her principles, his mind naturally fits into her scheme of the development of life on earth. The fact that he has an exceptional mind does not absolve her from a scientific explanation of that fact. In the rest of her ascending series of animal forms, Science has no trouble with any member of them, not excepting the chimpanzee. In him she finds that his mind or intelligence corresponds to his brain, and vice versa. But with the next primate, man, an immeasurable gap occurs, not between the body or the brain of either, for in both these respects the two are similar, but there is a gap in intelligence for which there is no measure. It requires some thinking adequately to estimate how great that gap is, and we have been trying by following the lines of the physical connections of man's bodily senses with his mind to perceive how tremendous the break really is.

Years ago I was once officially engaged in counting the assets of a great bank, in the course of which I held in my hand a piece of printed paper, with which had I owned it myself I could buy the cattle on a thousand hills. But had it been offered to any chimpanzee who has ever been evolved, to choose between that piece of paper and a cocoanut, the cocoanut would have been reached for every time. The nut and the paper belonged to two worlds of things infinitely apart.

The fundamental distinction between the two lies in the transcendent fact that Man is a person, something which no other animal is. A person living in a world of persons shows in his most ordinary common-place acts that there can be no real identity between himself and animals. Writing a letter and then dropping it into a street mail box implies these differences from the denizens of a cocoanut grove : a city with everything which makes a city; a great country where government provides post offices by which letters may go anywhere if properly stamped; the faculty of speech expressed now not by mouth but by a typewriting machine on its special letter paper. How can biology explain any of these things? The most brilliant discoveries made by biologists have not been made in man, but in worms, as by Wilson in annelids, and by Boveri in ascarides. These biologists could not have done better, with such a great subject as animal life, than to begin with the simpler forms. But there can be nothing in common between man and worms, except that both have animal bodies. What we insist upon is that nothing bodily accounts for personality.

At the next stage in our ascent new heights appear which overtop anything yet encountered. So far man has been content to keep company with his physical senses, and when they grew weak to supply them with divers inventions of his to help them keep up with him. But now he pro-poses to leave them all behind, because they can only start him on his journey, something like a convenient cab which brings him to the railroad station. They cannot also be to him like the express train which is to transport him to some far-off destination in the great continent of knowledge. Ere long he will part with the imagination also, because it is too weak a faculty now, since it can make its pictures only out of materials which the bodily senses furnish. A surer and more powerful agency than either the senses or the imagination is henceforth to carry him on, namely, his Understanding, that oldest and best name for the human Reason. The scientist walks by reason and not by sight. If he be a chemist he busies himself only with molecules, atoms, and ions, each one of these things being much larger than the other. I heard a professor of organic chemistry enthusiastically remark that he had met with such a huge molecule among the sugars, that if only he could multiply it twenty-five times he could then see it with a microscope! But no one has yet seen, or detected by any bodily sense whatever, a single molecule, still less an atom, and far less an ion which is a hundred thousand times smaller than an atom. Then in the realm of pure physics all these things are also talked about until we finally hear about little else than the Ether, that wonderful something which not the most vivid imagination can connect with a bodily sense. Then when further progress in this direction slackens, the motor of mathematics is attached. Helmholtz regretted that Faraday, not being a mathematician like Clerk Max-well, may have failed on that account to achieve still greater triumphs in physics than those which have made his name immortal. But where do we find ourselves now? Science can give only the same answer with Philosophy we are in the realm of pure mind. Back of anything physical, and greater than anything physical, is the great fact of facts, Mind! And is not Mind to be found elsewhere in this Universe than on this little earth?

This last question suggests another which is not easy to answer, and that is, why men naturally disbelieve in the existence of anything if it be not testified to directly by their bodily senses? Despite all evidences of the imperfections, if not of the untrustworthiness of those senses, most people will promptly reject whatever is not certified to by them, as if they constitute the sole foundations of belief. Reason may then protest, but she protests in vain.

All this is well illustrated by the history of one great word, which like many similar words we owe to that remarkable race which once appeared, as biologists would say, like a human sport in the small country of Greece. Such sports in Nature arise, no one knows why or how, and certainly it is not easy to account for the wonderful variety of intellectual gifts which the ancient Greeks possessed. Thus our English language testifies to the lusty vigor of our ancestors, for when we would speak or write strongly we rather use plain, short Anglo-Saxon words. But so soon as we wish to think clearly or scientifically, we have to ask the old Greeks, as the Romans did wholesale before us, to lend us their words, philosophy, theology, metaphysics, logic, theory, hypothesis, analysis, synthesis, music, and harmony; or physics, mathematics, arithmetic, circle, diameter, periphery, parallel, astronomy, geometry, geography, biology, physiology, and all other ologies ; botany, chemistry, molecule, atom, ion, etc., etc. In fact our philosophy and our science would both come to a standstill if they had to speak only in English.

Now one splendid Greek word for whose irreparable loss the later Greeks were themselves to blame, was the word skepticism. The original Greek noun, a skeptic, meant a thoughtful, reflecting man, an inquirer after facts or reasons, from the verb to look carefully around and to consider. Socrates claimed to be a skeptic, because he held his judgment in suspense until he could decide according to reasons. But in the course of barely three centuries this fine stock of men died out, and were succeeded by what our Western cattle-growers would call a breed of runts. Instead of the like of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, there arose a set called Pyrrhonists who made skepticism synonymous with its wretched counterfeit, Incredulity, and it has retained this ignoble meaning ever since, leaving the word in its original sense as dead and gone as the great-minded race of men who first made it. It was reserved for a man of another people, who when writing to Greeks thus defined the duty of a true skeptic, Prove all things and then hold fast to that which is good.

Now the contrasts between true skepticism and incredulity are these. Skepticism is deliberate, distrustful of appearances, grave, and candid. Incredulity needs no thought, but is peremptory and scornful, and not being reasonable it cannot be reasoned with. The one is a high and strong mental virtue, because it acknowledges no authority but that of reason. The other is a sign of mental debility, since the sup-posed verdict of the bodily senses is its all-sufficient authority. Because intrinsically they are of the same nature, both credulity and incredulity may be found in the same person. There are those who contemptuously brush aside the greatest achievements of medical science as they would a gnat, and then readily swallow a whole line of camels laden with the cures of so-called Christian Science. Incredulity was illustrated by a king of Siam who angrily ordered a traveller out of his presence because he said that in his country the water became so hard in winter that elephants could walk upon it. So when I stated to some Arabs that the earth revolved on its axis, they sneered as they pointed to the sea and asked if it would not all be spilled when the earth turned over. Once, while talking to a roomful of the naturally bright people of a town in Mt. Hermon about the achievements of West-ern civilization, I happened to tell a tooth-less old man present that in our country we had skilled persons who could make for him an entirely new set of teeth. Glancing round the room, I noticed some listeners stroking their beards in a fashion which I knew meant that I was telling a preposterous yarn. Fortunately I had with me an elderly Scotch friend who had a set of false teeth, and on explaining the situation to him, he forthwith opened his mouth and pulled the whole set out. The Arabs jumped to their feet in fright, not sure but he might start to unscrew his head next, for had any of their venerated ancestors ever seen such an uncanny performance with teeth? They afterwards solemnly said that never would they have believed this if they had not seen it.

There is the essence of incredulity the world over, for a common English saying is, Only seeing is believing; in other words, we are to believe most in the reports of that sense which is more uniformly mistaken than in any other. The scientist, and particularly the biologist, is not sure about what he sees until he has otherwise tested it. Thus thirty-three distinct varieties of streptococci have been identified so far, and though in appearance they look exactly alike, it will make considerable difference to a man which one of them happens to get into him. Likewise all metazoa begin each as a micrococcus, and they then all look alike both outside and in, though one is to grow into an ox, the other into a guinea pig, the other into an onion, and the other, it may be, into a professor of biology. Some powerful living things which we have spoken of have not yet been seen at all. Now it is not that scientists underrate the senses, but knowing their limitations they never allow them to contradict reason, however sense-born incredulity remains impatient of contradiction.

But the despotism of incredulity is most strikingly shown by the attitude of multitudes on the subject of the existence of mind. If only they could see mind, then they would be sure of its real existence. Every other evidence of mind, from an imposing cathedral to the equipments of a great university, leaves them still in doubt as to what mind is, including what their own minds are. May it not be simply an attribute of matter which we can see and touch, such, for example, as brain matter? But modern medical science has deprived them even of this last visible and tangible mental stuff, as it proves that the brain no more itself thinks than the hand does, but, like the hand, is nothing else than the instrument of the invisible thinker. As with the hands and the feet, we have two brains, but only one of the two is that human brain which is the seat of all human mental faculty, while its fellow is nothing more than the brain of the primate Homo. It is the left brain in right-handed persons, and the right brain in the left-handed, which is the brain of a philosopher, of a statesman, of a poet, of an orator and what not, while its fellow knows not a word, nor can it recognize an object by any of the senses, nor conceive an idea. If brain matter as such is the source of mind, then both our brain hemispheres would be equally mental, when the truth is that a man can feel just where his mind is in his head if he puts the proper hand to the other side of his skull. How it happens that virtually only half our brain matter is intelligent, and what that " how " proves as to ourselves, is discussed at length in the author's book, Brain and Personality, and therefore need not be further detailed here.

In conclusion we may say that it is quite natural for many persons to be perplexed at the opposite deductions of scientific men on the subject of the origin and nature of physical life. Some scientific authorities strongly, if not contemptuously, maintain that life is a purely chemico-physical phenomenon which some day will be so demonstrated. The conception that it is not so, but sui generis, they regard as a lingering superstitious myth. Others as firmly believe that nothing physico-chemical can possibly account for life, and that there is no real evidence fer such a supposition.

Now let no one imagine that this divergence of opinion can be removed by Evidence, because men are not constituted that way. Not by science are men born again, for however scientific they be, they remain the same as the rest of us, in that their opinions are settled for them, not by evidence, but by Preference, wherever preference has anything to do with a question.

Some may regard this statement as a humiliating arraignment of human reason, but whether humiliating or not, it is true. Opinions, the world over, have little connection with evidence, so that many of them instead have geographical boundaries. This of itself is enough, for reason as such has no more connection with geography than with meteorology. Opinions, on the other hand, come usually from the interests engendered by circumstances, such as birthplace, inheritance, historical influences, party, or sect. One would not expect that a native of New England and a native of China would have many opinions in common. And so the great conflicts of history have not been decided by reasoning. One such conflict lately occurred in America, in which two branchas of the same race, the one as well equipped with reasoning powers as the other, entertained such opposite opinions according to the side on which they happened to be born, of Mason and Dixon's geographical line, that finally their opinions were settled, not by arguments, but only by powder and ball.

Now it happens that on no subject in the world will opinions be found to be so determined ultimately by preference, as on this subject of the nature of physical life. Here likes and dislikes, and not evidence, shape everything both in investigation and in discussion. The overpowering sway of Motive will be made plain by the following considerations.

As we have seen, the problem of the origin of physical life finally ends with the question, What are we ourselves? If only it ended before we became included in it, there would have been as little dispute as there is in a question about botany. But as it is, a now familiar answer to this question is, that we virtually are things which have come into existence by Evolution. What this means was explained by Huxley, and in brief is as follows : The doctrine of evolution assumes that in the primeval nebula from which this planet was evolved, everything potentially existed, which in time would visibly belong to it. As by its own original properties it ultimately would give origin to seas and continents, so by them alone it would give origin to life, whose successive forms would be evolved by the interaction of its own physical laws and forces.. As evolution knows of no break or intervention, therefore we ourselves are its products also. Poets, philosophers, scientists, and all other human beings are samples of things which have thus come to be.

When the Darwinian theory was first promulgated, great was the enthusiasm of its advocates, because it seemed to give an account of the process of evolution fully in keeping with the fundamental postulates of the doctrine itself. We have seen how the astronomer, Sir Robert Ball, was enraptured with it on that account. We may remark, however, in passing, that the public has had several recent illustrations of the truth that astronomers, as such, are the last persons who can speak intelligently about life, because they deal with nothing living, but only with very distant physical bodies, most of which are furiously burning. To speak at all about physical life, they first should walk on this earth like other people. But every such school of thought, whether astronomers, physicists, or biologists, have this bond of union between them, namely, the doctrine that we ourselves are things which have come into existence in essentially the same way as other things do.

No contradiction could be greater than that between this doctrine and the greatest truth which underlies this human world, as it can be expressed in these few words:

Things are not responsible, but persons are.

Every person, however insignificant he may seem to be, entails responsibility in one way or another. Thousands of poor immigrants are daily landed upon our shores, every one of whom then looks insignificant enough. And so they are quite forgotten until we find that they have become voters, and count just the same as ourselves, so that we pay heavily in taxes and in misgovernment for our neglect of their education and due consideration. No person could have appeared more insignificant than the negro Dred Scott, when his case came before the Supreme Court of the United States. But when that court ruled that he should be rated only as a saleable thing, and not as a per-son, the most stable government in the world, whose money market felt no jar when either of three of its beloved presidents was murdered that same government was shaken to its very foundations. History knows that the Dred Scott decision had more immediate effect in bringing on the terrible Civil War which followed it, than did any other one event.

There is no use, therefore, to continue. this discussion, because it will be of no avail when preference is so supremely dominant.

But that does not prevent us from stating our own preference, though from want of space we can refer to but a few out of many reasons for that preference.

In the first place, it looks incongruous to us for the advocate of this " thing" doctrine to put on the ermine of Science, and as Lord Chancellor take the seat of judgment. For he will lose both title and place with this first test case, which is that of one who may think of a person as a thing of molecules, atoms, and ions, only so long as what he is thinking about is the other fellow. But so soon as the same question is turned inwards and put to his own self, the conscious personality within answers with an emphatic, No! Let any one really try this on himself and he will see that he, and not molecules, is thinking, and that the consciousness of his own personal existence is his certainty of certainties, which will remain unshaken by all warring theorists outside.

Some persons regard any allusion to mind as out of place in a scientific discussion, because science is concerned only with sensible phenomena, and mind can neither be tasted, smelt, seen, nor heard; it cannot be weighed, analyzed, resolved, precipitated, measured, or spectroscoped. But in this enumeration the tremendous testimony of the greatest of the senses is left out. Mind can be felt, so vividly that compared with it all mere phenomena are what this word originally meant, only appearances.

After all, the chief desire of the thing doctrine advocates is the assurance of a mindless, impersonal, and mechanically produced universe. At all hazards, there-fore, it must be shown that the mind of the person, Man, is also of mechanical origin.

To admit that man's mind is not so, opens the way to the most far-reaching conclusions about the relations of mind to all existence. We have already shown how the person, Man, just because he is so, fills this world with his wonderful creations, none of which would exist but for his previously devising them. What would man create if, in place of his brief existence here, to him belonged that time which is unmeasured by the flight of years? But whose Image is now before us?

Equally as to his own being, it is plain that if he is to exist on this earth at all, he should have a physical body to correspond. It is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise. If he must eat, he should have a stomach like other eaters, and likewise, all his bodily organs should be in keeping with those of the earthly animals of his class. And so we find it, particularly in the case of that bodily organ, the brain, for man's brain and the chimpanzee's are so much alike that it takes an anatomist to tell the difference. But the same conscious personality within then says, I know that I am a real animal, but I also know that I am infinitely more than an animal, and there is the end of it.

Turning next to the subject of Evolution, to find what it really means, we perceive at once that instead of being an efficient cause, from the very nature of the case it is no cause at all. The running of a stream downhill is not the cause of its so running, for that is the earth's attraction of gravitation. And just so the long stream of the evolution of physical life is not caused by evolution. Science, there-fore, is quite right in seeking for the cause of evolution, and despite frequent failures hitherto, she should keep on in this quest, for the longer she does so the less will we hear of physical life being caused by evolution.

But in the course of this investigation Science will encounter a fact which is as much a fact as any other, and that is, that the human race, apparently because it is human, for no other species shows a trace of it, has always had a firm belief in the existence of a world unseen by human eye. This we meet not here and there, but everywhere. Incredulity is powerless against this belief. The lowest savage holds it so strongly that he is sure the most inanimate of objects has a living spirit behind it. But we have already mentioned a truth about sight which may indicate that this fancy of the savage has a physiological basis. The eye, by its imperfections as an instrument, has too often deceived him to have him believe that it sees all. We know that in this he is right, however mistaken he be as to the objects which it does not see, because the eye in us falls so far short of our faculty of sight itself that we have to make up its deficiencies in all directions. And so with the other senses. In man there is no correspondence between faculty and instrument. Something more, and again more, is the persistent demand of the personality within, when comparing the boundless range of faculty with the vexatious littleness of range in the bodily senses. Nothing of the kind is found in other animals, for they are as content with their sense organs as the ass is with an ass's diet. They never think of going beyond their bodily senses. But in man such an equipment of faculties, with such poor provision for their exercise, is like finding on a canal boat engines which originally must have been meant for a steamer which would traverse the widest oceans.

What wonder, then, that this truth, coupled with that of the little speck of time allowed on this earth for the use of any faculty, should always have suggested another life than this to man? In that wider life who knows but that Reason's present subordinate relations to the Will, so that she cannot act except as the will allows, will be reversed, and the will act only as reason prompts. But even now, instead of asking the weak earthly imagination, let us ask Reason herself to tell us what the change inevitably would be if we entered another world with our faculties still the same that we have here, but with no limitations in their use. With sight, the farthest constellations would be seen, as no earthly eye is made to see them, just as they are in all their glory; likewise the lineaments of every face could be discerned, though in an assembly of the whole human race, for distance would make no difference there as it does here. Again the ear could then hear, as no earthly ear can hear, the personal voice of every one there, whether in speech or song. Above all, the heart could then feel, and move to purpose and to design, as it never felt before.

These words have a familiar sound to us, because Paul used them on this same subject, but they will be lost upon him whose reasoning powers are paralyzed by imbecile Incredulity and perverse Will.