ge--the prick of a
pin suffices to prove that molecular motion can produce consciousness.
The reverse process of the production of motion by consciousness is
equally unpresentable to the mind. We are here, in fact, upon the
boundary line of the intellect, where the ordinary canons of science
fail to extricate us from our difficulties. If we are true to these
canons, we must deny to subjective phenomena all influence on physical
processes. Observation proves that they interact, but in passing from
one to the other, we meet a blank which mechanical deduction is unable
to fill. Frankly stated, we have here to deal with facts almost as
difficult to seize mentally as the idea of a soul. And if you are
content to make your 'soul' a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which
refuses the yoke of ordinary physical laws, I, for one, would not
object to this exercise of ideality. Amid all our speculative
uncertainty, however, there is one practical point as clear as the
day; namely, that the brightness and the usefulness of life, as well
as its darkness and disaster, depend to a great extent upon our own
use or abuse of this miraculous organ.

Accustomed as I am to harsh language, I am quite prepared to hear my
'poetic rendering' branded as a 'falsehood' and a 'fib.' The
vituperation is unmerited, for poetry or ideality, and untruth are
assuredly very different things. The one may vivify, while the other,
kills. When St. John extends the notion of a soul to 'souls washed
in the blood of Christ' does he 'fib'? Indeed, if the appeal to
ideality is censurable, Christ himself ought not to have escaped
censure. Nor did he escape it. 'How can this man give us his flesh to
eat?' expressed the sceptical flouting of unpoetic natures. Such are
still amongst us. Cardinal Manning would doubtless tell any
Protestant who rejects the doctrine of transubstantiation that he
'fibs' away the plain words of his Saviour when he reduces 'the Body
of the Lord' in the sacrament to a mere figure of speech.

Though misuse may render it grotesque or insincere, the idealisation
of ancient conceptions, when done consciously and above board, has, in
my opinion, an important future. We are not radically different from
our historic ancestors, and any feeling which affected them
profoundly, requires only appropriate clothing to affect us. The
world will not lightly relinquish its heritage of poetic feeling, and
metaphysic will be welcomed when it aban