"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal"d Within thy beams, O Sun! Or who could find, Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal"d, That to such countless...o...b.. thou mad"st us blind?
Why then do we shun death with anxious strife?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"
9 Spazier, Antiphadon, oder Prufung einiger Hauptbeweise fur die Einfachheit und Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele.
When the body dies, the mind is no longer manifested through it.
That is all we immediately know by perception. The inference that the mind has therefore ceased to be at all, is a mere supposition.
It may still live and act, independently of the body. An outside phenomenon can prove nothing here. We must by some psychological probe pierce to the core of the being and discern, as there concealed, the central interpretation of truth, or else, in want of this, turn from these surface shadows and seek the solution in some other province. Millions of appearances being opposed to the truth or inadequate to hint it, we must never implicitly trust their suggestions. What microscope can reveal the organic life in a kernel of corn, and show that through the decay of that kernel a stalk will spring up and bear a thousand kernels more? But if a new mental life emerges from the dying form of man, it lies in a spiritual realm whereinto we have no instruments to gaze. Every existent thing has its metes and limits. In fact, the only final weapon and fort of a thing is its environing limitation. It goes into nothing if that be taken down, the atheist says; into infinity, the mystic says. The mistake and difficulty lie in discerning what the last wall around the essence is. "The universe is the body of our body." The boundary of our life is boundless life. Schlegel has somewhere asked the question, "Is life in us, or are we in life?" Because man appears to be wholly extinguished in death, we have no right whatever in reason to conclude that he really is so. The star which seemed to set in the western grave of aged and benighted time, we, soon coming round east to the true spirit sky, may discern bright in the morning forehead of eternity. There can be no safe reasoning from the outmost husk and phenomenon of a thing to its inmost essence and result. And, in spite of any possible amount of appearance, man himself may pa.s.s distinct and whole into another sphere of being when his flesh falls to dust. That science should search in vain with her finest gla.s.ses to discern a royal occupant reigning in the purple chambered palace of the heart, or to trace any such mysterious tenant departing in sudden horror from the crushed and bleeding house of life, belongs to the necessary conditions of the subject; for spirit can only be spiritually discerned. As well might you seek to smell a color, or taste a sound, tie a knot of water, or braid a cord of wind.
Next comes the abstract Argument from Speculative Philosophy.
Under this head are to be included all those theories which deny the soul to be a spiritual ent.i.ty, but reduce it to an atomic arrangement, or a dependent attribute, or a process of action.
Heracleitus held that the soul was fire: of course, when the fuel was exhausted the fire would go out. Thales taught that it was water: this might all evaporate away. Anaximenes affirmed that it was air, of which all things were formed by rarefaction and condensation: on such a supposition it could have no permanent personal ident.i.ty. Critias said it was blood: this might degenerate and lose its nature, or be poured out on the ground.
Leucippus maintained that it was a peculiar concourse of atoms: as these came together, so they might fly apart and there be an end of what they formed. The followers of Aristotle a.s.serted that it was a fifth unknown substance, with properties of its own, unlike those of fire, air, water, and earth. This might be mortal or immortal: there was nothing decisive in the conception or the defining terms to prove which it was. Accordingly, the Peripatetic school has always been divided on the question of the immortality of the soul, from the time of its founder"s immediate disciples to this day. It cannot be clearly shown what the mighty Stagyrite"s own opinion really was.
Speculative conceptions as to the nature of the soul like the foregoing, when advanced as arguments to establish its proper mortality, are dest.i.tute of force, because they are gratuitous a.s.sumptions. They are not generalizations based on careful induction of facts; they are only arbitrary hypotheses.
Furthermore, they are inconsistent both with the facts and phenomena of experience. Mind cannot fairly be brought into the category of the material elements; for it has properties and performs functions emphatically distinguishing it from every thing else, placing it in a rank by itself, with exclusive predicates of its own. Can fire think? Can water will? Can air feel? Can blood see? Can a mathematical number tell the difference between good and evil? Can earth be jealous of a rival and loyal to a duty? Can a ganglion solve a problem in Euclid or understand the Theodicee of Leibnitz? It is absurd to confound things so distinct. Mind is mind, and matter is matter; and though we are now consciously acquainted with them only in their correlation, yet there is as much reason for supposing that the former survives the close of that correlation as for supposing that the latter does. True, we perceive the material remaining and do not perceive the spirit.
Yes; but the differentiation of the two is exactly this, that one is appreciable by the senses, while the other transcends and baffles them. It is absolutely inconceivable in imagination, wholly incredible to reason, intrinsically nonsensical every way, that a shifting concourse of atoms, a plastic arrangement of particles, a regular succession of galvanic shocks, a continuous series of nervous currents, or any thing of the sort, should const.i.tute the reality of a human soul, the process of a human life, the acc.u.mulated treasures of a human experience, all preserved at command and traversed by the moral lines of personal ident.i.ty. The things lie in different spheres and are full of incommunicable contrasts. However numerously and intimately correlated the physical and psychical const.i.tuents of man are, yet, so far as we can know any thing about them, they are steeply opposed to each other both in essence and function. Otherwise consciousness is mendacious and language is unmeaning. A recent able author speaks of "that congeries of organs whose union forms the brain and whose action const.i.tutes the mind." 10 The mind, then, is an action! Can an action love and hate, choose and resolve, rejoice and grieve, remember, repent, and pray? Is not an agent necessary for an action? All such speculative conceptions as to the nature of soul as make it purely phenomenal are to be offset, if they can be, by the view which exhibits the personal ego or conscious selfhood of the soul, not as an empty spot in which a swarm of relations centre as their goal point, but as an indestructible monad, the innermost and substantial essence and cause of the organization, the self apprehending and unchangeable axis of all thinking and acting. Some of the most free, acute, learned, wise, and powerful thinkers of the world have been champions of this doctrine; especially among the moderns may be named Leibnitz, Herbart, Goethe, and Hartenstein. Jacobi most earnestly maintained it both against Mendelssohn and against Fichte.
10 Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, p. 371.
That the mind is a substantial ent.i.ty, and therefore may be conceived as immortal, that it is not a mere functional operation accompanying the organic life, a phantom procession of conscious states filing off on the stage of the cerebrum "in a dead march of mere effects," that it is not, as old Aristoxenus dreamed, merely a harmony resulting from the form and nature of the body in the same way that a tune springs from the consenting motions of a musical instrument, seems to be shown by facts of which we have direct knowledge in consciousness. We think that the mind is an independent force, dealing with intellectual products, weighing opposing motives, estimating moral qualities, resisting some tendencies, strengthening others, forming resolves, deciding upon its own course of action and carrying out its chosen designs accordingly. If the soul were a mere process, it could not pause in mid career, select from the ma.s.s of possible considerations those adapted to suppress a base pa.s.sion or to kindle a generous sentiment, deliberately balance rival solicitations, and, when fully satisfied, proceed. Yet all this it is constantly doing. So, if the soul were but a harmony, it would give no sounds contrary to the affections of the lyre it comes from. But actually it resists the parts of the instrument from which they say it subsists, exercising dominion over them, punishing some, persuading others, and ruling the desires, angers, and fears, as if itself of a different nature.11 Until an organ is seen to blow its own bellows, mend its shattered keys, move its pedals, and play, with no foreign aid, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," or a violin tunes up its discordant strings and wields its bow in a spontaneous performance of the Carnival, showing us every Cremona as its own Paganini, we may, despite the conceits of speculative disbelief, hold that the mind is a dynamic personal ent.i.ty. That thought is the very "latch string of a new world"s wicket."
Thirdly, we have the fanciful Argument from a.n.a.logy. The keen champions of disbelief, with their athletic agility of dialectics, have made terrible havoc among the troops of poetic arguments from resemblance, drawn up to sustain the doctrine of immortality. They have exposed the feebleness of the argument for our immortality from the wonderful workmanship and costliness of human nature, on the ground that what requires the most pains and displays the most skill and genius in its production is the most lovingly preserved.
For G.o.d organizes the mind of a man just as easily as he constructs the geometry of a diamond. His omnipotent attributes are no more enlisted in the creation of the intelligence of an elephant or the grat.i.tude of a soul than they are in the fabrication of the wing of a gnat or the fragrance of a flower.
Infinite wisdom and power are equally implied in each and in all.
They have shown the gross defectiveness of the comparison of the b.u.t.terfly and psyche. The b.u.t.terfly, lying in the caterpillar neatly folded up like a flower in the bud, in due time comes forth. It is a material development, open to the senses, a common demonstration tosensible experience. The disengagement of a spirit from a fleshly encas.e.m.e.nt, on the other hand, is a pure hypothesis wholly removed from sensible apprehension. There is no parallel in the cases. So the ridiculousness has been made evident of Plato"s famous a.n.a.logical argument that by a general law of nature all things are produced contraries from contraries; warmth dies into the
11 Plato, Phado, 98.
life of cold, and lives out of the death of cold; night is born from the death of day, and day is born from the death of night; and thus everywhere death springs from life, and life from death.12 The whole comparison, considered as evidence of human immortality, is baseless and full of astonishing sophistry. When one hemisphere of the earth is turned away from the sun, it is night there; when it is turned towards the sun, it is day again.
To this state of facts this revolving succession there is obviously no parallelism whatever in the two phenomenal phases of man, life and death, whereof one finishes its course and then the other seems fixed forever. In like manner, when Jeremy Taylor,13 after the example of many others, especially of old Licetus, argues soberly, as he does in a letter to Evelyn, for the immortality of the soul from the a.n.a.logy of lamps burning in tombs for centuries with no waste of matter, there is no apposite and valid similarity, even if the instances were not a childish fable.
An equally baseless argument for the existence of an independent spiritual body within the material body, to be extricated from the flesh at death and to survive in the same form and dimensions, we recollect having seen in a work by a Swedenborgian author.14 He reasons that when a person who has suffered amputation feels the lost limb as vividly as ever before, the phenomenon is palpable proof of a spirit limb remaining while the fleshly one is gone! Of course, the simple physiological explanation is that the mind instinctively refers the sensations brought in by the severed nerves to the points where, by inveterate custom, it has. .h.i.therto learned to trace their origination. The report being the same, it is naturally attributed to the same source.
But those skeptics who have mercilessly exposed these fallacious arguments from a.n.a.logy have themselves reasoned in the same way as fallaciously and as often. When individual life leaves the physical man, say they, cosmical life immediately enters the corpse and restores it to the general stock of nature; so when personal consciousness deserts the psychical man, the universal spirit resumes the dissolving soul. When certain conditions meet, a human soul is formed, a gyrating current of thought, or a vortex of force: soon some accident or a spent impulse breaks the eddy, and the individual subsides like a whirl in the air or a water spout in the sea. When the spirit fuel of life is exhausted, man goes out as an extinguished candle. He ceases like a tone from a broken harp string. All these a.n.a.logies are vitiated by radical unlikeness between the things compared. As arguments they are perfectly worthless, being spoiled by essential differences in the cases. Wherein there is a similarity it falls short of the vital point. There is no justice in the conception of man as a momentary gyre of individual consciousness drawn from the universal sea by a sun burst of the Spirit. He is a self ruling intelligence, using a dependent organism for his own ends, comprehending his own destiny, successively developing its conditions and acquiring the materials for occupying and improving them, with a prevision of eternity. A flower may just as well perish as live, a musical sound cease as continue, a lamp be put out as burn on: they know not the difference. Not so with the soul of man. We here overpa.s.s a discrete degree and enter upon a subject
12 Crawford, On the Phadon of Plato.
13 Heber"s Life and Works of Jeremy Taylor, vol. i. p. 69.
14 Dee Guays, True System of Religious Philosophy, Letter V.
within another circle of categories. Let the rash reasoner who madly tries conclusions on a matter of such infinite pith and moment, with data so inapt and poor, pause in sacred horror before, having first "Put out the light, he then puts out THE LIGHT!"
There are peculiarities in the soul removing it out of the range of physical combinations and making a distinct destiny fairly predicable of it. When we reflect on the nature of a self contained will, intelligent of immaterial verities and perhaps transcendent of s.p.a.ce and time, how burlesque is the terror of the ancient corpuscular theorists lest the feebly cohering soul, on leaving the body, especially if death happened during a storm, would be blown in pieces all abroad! Socrates, in the Phado, has a hearty laugh over this; but Lucretius seriously urges it.15 The answer to the skeptical reasoning from a.n.a.logy is double. First, the lines of partial correspondence which visibly terminate within our tangible reach can teach nothing as to the termination of other lines which lead out of sight and disappear in a spiritual region. An organized material form for instance, a tree is fatally limited: else it would finally fill and exhaust the earth. But no such limiting necessity can be predicated of mind. Secondly, as far as there is genuine a.n.a.logy, its implications are much stronger in favor of immortality than against it. Matter, whose essence is materiality, survives all apprehensible changes; spirit, whose essence is spirituality, should do the same.
Another attack on the doctrine of a future life is masked in the negative Argument from Ignorance. We do not know how we shall live again; we are unable to construct the conditions and explain the details of a spiritual state of existence; and therefore, it is said, we should of right conclude that there is no such thing. The proposition is not usually stated so blankly; but it really amounts to that. The Epicureans say, as a tree cannot exist in the sky, nor clouds in the ocean, nor fishes in the meadow, nor water in stone, thus the mind cannot exist apart from the nerves and the blood. This style of reasoning is a bold begging of the question.
Our present experience is vacant of any specific knowledge of the conditions, methods, and contents of a life it has not yet experienced: therefore there is no such life. Innumerable millions of facts beyond our present knowledge unquestionably exist. It is not in any way difficult to conceive that innumerable millions of experiences and problems now defying and eluding our utmost powers may hereafter fall within our comprehension and be easily solved.
Will you accept the horizon of your mind as the limit of the universe? In the present, experience must be confined within its own boundaries by the necessity of the case. If an embryo were endowed with a developed reasoning consciousness, it could not construct any intelligible theory of the world and life into which it was destined soon to emerge. But it would surely be bad logic to infer, because the embryo could not, from want of materials within its experience, ascertain the how, the when, the where, and the what, of the life awaiting it, that there was no other life reserved for it. An acorn buried and sprouting in the dark mould, if endowed with intelligent consciousness, could not know any definite particulars of its maturer life yet to be in the upper light and air, with cattle in its shade and
15 Lib. iii. ll. 503-508.
singing birds in its branches. Ignorance is not a ground of argument, only of modest suspense. We can only reason from what we know. And the wondrous mysteries or natural miracles with which science abounds, myriads of truths transcending all fictions, melt and remove from the path of faith every supposed difficulty. Any quant.i.ty of facts have been scientifically established as real which are intrinsically far more strange and baffling to belief than the a.s.sertion of our immortality is. Indeed, "there is no more mystery in the mind living forever in the future than in its having been kept out of life through a past eternity. The authentic wonder is the fact of the transition having been made from the one to the other; and it is far more incredible that, from not having been, we are, than that, from actual being, we shall continue to be." 16
The unbounded possibilities of life suggested by science and open to imagination furnish sufficient reply to the objection that we cannot conceive the precise causes and modes of a future state.
Had one little part.i.tular been different in the structure of the eye, or in the radiation and media of light, we should never have seen the stars! We should have supposed this globe the whole of creation. So some slightest integument or hindering condition may now be hiding from us the sublime reality and arrangements of immortality which in death"s disenveloping hour are to burst into our vision as the stellar hemisphere through the night. Shut up now to one form of being and one method of experience, how can we expect an exhaustive knowledge of other and future forms and methods of being and experience? It is a contradiction to ask it.
But the soul is warranted in having faith, like a buried mustard seed which shall yet mount into its future life. A sevenfold denser mystery and a seven times narrower ignorance would bring no real argument against the survival of the soul. For in an omnipotent infinitude of possibilities one line of ignorance cannot exhaust the avenues and capacities of being. Escaping the flesh, we may soar into heaven
"Upon ethereal wings, whose way Lies through an element so fraught With living Mind that, as they play, Their every movement is a thought."
Ignorance of the scientific method avails nothing against moral proofs of the fact. The physiologist studying the coats of the stomach, the anatomist dissecting the convolutions of the brain, could never tell that man is capable of sentiment, faith, and logic. No stethoscope can discern the sound of an expectation, and no scalpel can lay bare a dream; yet there are expectations and dreams. No metaphysical gla.s.s can detect, no prognosis foresee, the death of the soul with the dissolution of its organs: on empirical grounds, the a.s.sertion of it is therefore unwarranted.
But though no amount of obscurity enveloping the subject, no extent of ignorance disabling us now to grasp the secret, is a legitimate basis of disbelief, yet actually, there can be no doubt, in mult.i.tudes of instances, the effectual cause of disbelief in immortality is the impossibility of vividly conceiving its conditions and scenery; "for," as one of the subtlest of thinkers has remarked, "however far faith may go beyond experience, it
16 Martineau, Sermon on Immortality, in Endeavors after the Christian Life.
must always be chained down by it at a distance." But if there are good grounds for antic.i.p.ating another life, then man should confide in it, no matter how incompetent he is to construct its theatre and foresee its career. A hundred years ago, one might have scouted the statement that the most fearful surgical operations would be performed without inflicting pain, because it was impossible to see how it could be done. Or if a person had been informed that two men, one in Europe and one in America, should converse in lightning athwart the bed of the Atlantic, he might have rejected it as an absurdity, because he could not conceive the mode. If destined to a future life, all we could reasonably expect to know of it now would be through hinting germs and mystic presentiments of it. And there we do experience to the fullest extent: their ceaseless prophecies are everywhere with us,
"Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized."
The last weapon of disbelief in a future life is the Scientific Argument from Materialism. Lucretius says, "There is nothing in the universe but bodies and the properties of bodies." This is a characteristic example of the method of the materialists: to a.s.sume, as an unquestionable postulate, the very point in debate, and that, too, in defiance of the intelligent instincts of consciousness which compel every unsophisticated person to acknowledge the simultaneous existence of mind and matter as two correlated yet distinct realities. The better statement would be, There is nothing in the universe but forces and the relations of forces. For, while we know ourselves in immediate self consciousness, as personal intelligences perceiving, willing, and acting, all we know of an outward world is the effects produced on us by its forces. Certainly the powers of the universe can never be lost from the universe. Therefore if our souls are, as consciousness declares, causes, and not mere phenomena, they are immortal. To ignore either factor in the problem of life, the material substratum or the dynamic agent, is mere narrowness and blindness.
But the unbelieving naturalist argues that the total man is a product of organization, and therefore that with the dissolution of the living combination of organs all is over. Matter is the marriage bed and grave of soul. Priestley says, "The principle of thought no more belongs to substance distinct from body than the principle of sound belongs to substance distinct from bell." There is no relevancy in the comparison, because the things are wholly unlike. Thought is not, as Hartley"s theory avowed it was, a vibration of a cerebral nerve, as sound is a vibration of a sonorous body; for how could these vibrations be acc.u.mulated in memory as our mental experiences are? When a material vibration ends, it has gone forever; but thoughts are stored up and preserved. A hypothetical simile, like that just cited from Priestley, is not a cogent argument. It is false science thus to limit the modes of being to what lies within our present empirical knowledge. Is it not pure presumptuousness to affirm that the creative power of Almighty G.o.d is shut up so that intelligent creatures can only exist in forms of flesh? When a recent materialist makes the a.s.sertion, "The thinking man is the sum of his senses," it is manifest that he goes beyond the data, a.s.suming what should be proved, and confounding the instruments and material with the workman. It is as if one should say, "A working cotton manufactory is the sum of its machines," excluding the persons by whose guiding oversight all is done. Plainly, it may be granted that all which man knows is brought in through the door of the senses, without allowing the same of all that man is. We have no warrant for p.r.o.nouncing the identical coextensiveness of what man learns to know and what he is created to be. The very proposition, man knows something, presupposes three things, a subject, an act, and an object. Whether the three exist and perish together or not is matter for discussion, and not fairly to be settled by forcibly lumping the heterogeneous three into h.o.m.ogeneous unity.
In the present state of science it must be confessed that all kinds of physical force whether mechanical, chemical, vital, or nervous are drawn more or less directly from the sun, the material reservoir of power for our solar system. This must be admitted, although some recent materialists have pushed the doctrine so far that they may be called the Pa.r.s.ees of the West. Whenever the proper conditions for an animate being are furnished, a force derived from the sun lifts matter from its stable equilibrium to the level of organic existence. In due season, from its wavering life struggle there, it decays back to the deep rest of insensate earth.17 This is a truth throughout the organic realm, from the bulb of a sea weed to the brain of a Casar. So much cannot be denied. Every organism constantly receives from the universe food and force, and as constantly restores in other forms the material and dynamical equivalents of what it receives, and finally itself goes to the sources whence it came. But the affirmation of this for all within the physical realm is not the admission of it for what subsists in an immeasurably higher rank and totally different realm. Entering the psychical sphere, where we deal with a new, distinct order of realities, not impenetrability, weight, extension, but thought, affection, will, why may not this province contain eternities, even though the other holds only mortalities?
It is a question to be examined on its own grounds, not to be put aside with a foregone conclusion. In nature the cause endures under all evanescent changes, and survives all phenomenal beginnings and endings: so in spirit the causal personality, if there be one, may outlast all the shifting currents of the outward phenomena in endless persistence. Of course, the manifestation of the mind through the senses must cease when the senses no longer remain. The essence of the controversy, then, is exactly this: Is the mind an ent.i.ty? or is it a collection of functions? If the soul be a substantial force, it is immortal. If it be a phenomenal resultant, it ceases at death.
A reductio ad absurdum immediately occurs. If the psychical totality of man consists of states of feeling, modes of volition, and powers of thought, not necessitating any spiritual ent.i.ty in which they inhere, then, by parity of reasoning, the physical totality of man consists of states of nutrition, modes of absorption, and powers of change, implying no body in which these processes are effectuated! Qualities cannot exist without a subject: and just as physical attributes involve a body, spiritual attributes involve a mind. And, if a mental ent.i.ty be admitted, its death or cessation with that of its outer dress or case is not a fair inference, but needs appropriate evidence.
The soul of a man has been defined as the sum of his ideas, an idea being a state of the consciousness. But the essence of mind must be the common ground and element of all
17 Moleschott, Licht and Leben.
different states of consciousness. What is that common ground and element but the presence of a percipient volitional force, whether manifested or unmanifested, still there? That is the germinal core of our mental being, integrating and holding in continuous ident.i.ty all the phenomenal fluctuations of consciousness. It is clear that any other representation seems inconsistent with the most central and vivid facts of our knowledge. In ill.u.s.tration of this, let us see how every materialistic exposition omits utterly, or fails to account for, the most essential element, the solitary and crowning peculiarity, of the case. For example, it is said that thought or consciousness is a phenomenal process of changes sustained in the brain by a correlation of forces, just as the rainbow appears, but has no ontological subsistence of its own: the continuous spectrum hangs steady on the ceaselessly renewed substratum of the moving mist rack and the falling rain. But the comparison is absolutely inapplicable, because the deepest ground principle of the mind is wanting in the rainbow, namely, conscious and continuous ident.i.ty holding in each present moment all the changes of the past moments. If the rainbow were gifted with consciousness, it could not preserve its personal ident.i.ty, but merely its phenomenal ident.i.ty, for any two successive moments, since its whole being would consist of an untied succession of states.
Traversing the body from its extreme tissues to the gray vesicular substance composing the spinal cord and covering the surface and convolutions of the brain, are two sets of white, fibrous nerves.
One set, the afferents, bring in sensation, all kinds of tidings, from the out world of matter. The other set, the efferents, carry out volition, all kinds of decrees, from the in world of mind.
Without an afferent nerve no influence of the world can reach the mind; and without an efferent nerve no conclusion of the mind can reach the world. As we are now const.i.tuted, this machinery is necessary for the intercommunication of the mind and the material universe. But if there be something in the case besides live machinery and crossing telegrams, if there be a monarch mind inaccessible to the vulgar crowd of things and only conversing with them through the internuncial nerves, that spirit ent.i.ty may itself be capable of existing forever in an ideal universe and of communing there face to face with its own kingly lineage and brood. And we maintain that the account of the phenomena is grossly defective, and that the phenomena themselves are palpably inexplicable, except upon the supposition of such an ent.i.ty, which uses the organism but is not the organism itself nor a function of it. "Ideas," one materialist teaches, "are transformed sensations." Yes; but that does not supersede a transforming mind.
There must be a force to produce the transformations. "The phenomena of mind," says another, "consist in a succession of states of consciousness." Yes; but what is it that presides over, takes up, and preserves this succession? The phenomena of the mind are not the mind itself. "The actions of the mind are the functions of the cerebrum," adds a third. Yes; but the inquiry is, what is the mind itself? not, what are its acts? The admission of the gray nerve cells of the brain, as the material substratum through which sensations are received and volitions returned, does not exclude the necessity of a dynamical cause for the metamorphosing phenomenon. That cause must be free and intelligent, because the products of its action, as well as its accompanying consciousness, are marked by freedom and intelligence.
For example, when a cylindrical and
fibrous porter deposits his sensitive burden in the vesicular and cineritious substance, something examines it, tests its import, reflects on what shall be done, forms an intelligent resolution, and commands another porter to bear the dynamic load forth. The reflective and determining something that does this is the mind.
Thus, by the fact of an indissoluble dynamic will, is the broad lineal experience of man grasped and kept from dissipating into crumbled psychical states, as when the dead kings of ancient India were burned their corpses were wrapped in asbestos shrouds to hold the ashes together.