parallel to a physical
development--as spiritual law appears to be always parallel (as far as
the nature of things permits) to physical laws--still is a development
which cannot under any possible circumstances dispense with an external
spiritual order of existence, and one which cannot be physically caused.
Nor is it conceivable that man should develop a consciousness of God,
when no God really exists externally to the consciousness.[1]
[Footnote 1: For our consciousness of God is obviously very different
from a figment of the imagination, or the sort of reality experienced in
a dream. This is not the place to develop such an argument, but it seems
to me more than doubtful whether we can even _imagine_ something
_absolutely_ non-existent in nature. When the artist's imagination would
construct, e.g., a winged dragon, the concept is always made up of
_parts which are real_--eyes like an alligator, bat-wings, scales of a
fish or crocodile, and so forth. All the members or parts are real, put
together to form the unreal. I do not believe that any instance of a
human conception can be brought forward which on analysis will not
conform to this rule.]
The main objection, then, that I would press is, that admitting any
possibility of the development of man from a purely physical and
structural point of view, admitting any inference that may be drawn
fairly from the undoubted connection (increasingly great as it is as we
go upwards from the lower animal to the ape) between animals and man,
that inference never can touch the descent of man as a whole; because no
similarity of bodily structure can get over the difficulty of the mental
power of man. We have to deal not with a part of man, but with the
whole. The difficulty cannot be got over by denying _mind_ as a thing
_per se_; for all attempts to represent mind as the _mere_ product of a
physical structure, the brain, utterly fail.
Nobody wishes to deny what Dr. H. Maudsley and others have made so plain
to us, that mind has (in one aspect, at any rate) a physical basis--that
is, that no thought, imagination, or combination of thought, is known to
us _apart from_ change and expenditure of energy in the brain. Nor can
we, by any process of introspection or observation of other subjects,
separate the mind from the brain and ascertain the existence of "pure
mind," or soul, experimentally. But still, there is no possibility of
getting the operations of mind out of mere cell
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