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demonstration. How it exists or how it coheres with the material body are unsolved problems. But this mystery unknown can not weigh against the facts known. Organization is the formation of a living body. Inorganic matter is the material out of which it is built up, and LIFE is the artificer.

2. We have been led also to a just discrimination between animal and vegetable life. We have found that the plant is not only destitute of the organs of sight, hearing, and the other senses; also that it is destitute of the nervous matter which constitutes the sensorial structure of animals, and, consequently, there can be no nervous sensibility in the plant. And then, still further, that there are, in other respects, positive dissimilarities and antagonisms that widely separate the vegetable from the animal creation. We have been thus led to conclude that there is a generic difference between the life of the plant and the life of the animal. Organism, we have seen, is the product, not of matter, but of life. The character of the organism, too, is determined, not by the character of the inorganic materials out of which it is constructed, but by the specific nature of the life which was the artificer. If, then, organisms, so widely different, are wrought out from the same elementary materials, the life effecting the organism must be substantially different. If we bring nitrogen into union with oxygen, the result is air, and if we bring hydrogen into union with it, the result is water. The reaching of these different results from the same element shows that the agencies brought to bear upon it were themselves different. So when we see vegetable life on the vegetable germ, and the animal ovum working upon the same material, and yet invariably bringing forth results so widely different, the

*Air is composed of 22.2 parts oxygen and 77.7 nitrogen; water 88.9 parts oxygen and 11.1 nitrogen.

conclusion is inevitable that the life of the plant is widely different from that of the animal.

The

3. The fact that animal and vegetable life are so dissimilar in their character affords a reasonable presumption that the "living soul" in man differs widely from either. What animal or vegetable life may be, how closely it may be allied to material substance, or how far removed from it, it may not be necessary for us to inquire now. point insisted upon is simply that God has created different kinds of life. The gradations, not of development or of organism, but of life, so created, rising from the vegetable to the animal, finally culminate in man, who has been endowed with a living soul.

4. This suggests, finally, the possible relations man may sustain to the unknown and the infinite. To the animal is awarded a higher life, a broader range, and more extended relations to the created universe than to the plant. But still higher in the scale is man. Through his material nature he is allied to all material existences, but through his spiritual he is allied to all spiritual intelligences in the universe of God. This spiritual life within us relates us to the infinite, and lifts us into communion with it. But for that we could no more apprehend spiritual existence or the Divine Being than the blind man can apprehend the beauties of color in nature. This spiritual nature, then, unfolds an infinitude of relations. Does it not, at the same time, give us intimations of a destiny whose breadth and duration surpass all the bounds of our present comprehension?

"The chain of being is complete in me,

In me is matter's last gradation lost,
And the next step is spirit-Deity!

I can command the lightning, and am dust!
A monarch and a slave! a worm, a god !"

III.

THE HUMAN SOUL NOT A FUNCTION OF MATTER.

"There is a spirit in man." JOB XXXii, 8.

"And man became a living soul." GEN. ii, 7.

"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul." MATT. X, 28.

"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." ECCL. xii, 17.

EVERY instinct of our nature, no less than the calm exercise of reason, coincides with the Scripture declaration that "there is a spirit in man." Yet men have not been wanting, who have sought to prove that themselves and all their race are only a higher order of brutes; that, in fact, man is simply a developed ape. They have used the spirit, the noble and godlike intellect bestowed upon them, in wicked effort to prove that no such thing as soul or spirit exists.

The doctrine of this class of philosophers is, that the human soul, instead of being a substance in itself, instead of possessing an existence distinct from that of the body, is a mere result of the peculiar bodily organization. In other words, that it is a function of matter. Their theory is, that "the bones, muscles, blood vessels, blood, nerves, and brain, constitute a thinking and feeling machine, working on chemical and mechanical principles." Such a machine as here described, when four-footed, is a brute; when a biped, with wings and feathers, a fowl; and when a biped, without wings and feathers, a man! Marvelous discovery! If this is modern science, what is human folly?

It may be stated, as a general fact, that there are but two opinions in relation to the nature of the human soul. Between these two there are no grounds upon which to erect any other. And into one or the other of these opinions, all theories, in the last analysis, resolve themselves. The first-that which we have endeavored to establish-is that the soul is an independent spiritual existence; the other, that it is a function of matter. This latter is the essential doctrine of materialists, whatever may be the form in which they express it.

I. MATERIALISTS ASSERT THAT THE SOUL IS A FUNCTION OF MATTER THEIR STATEMENTS QUOTED.

To set at rest the possible charge that we have misrepresented them, we propose to let these materialists speak for themselves: D'Holbach says, "If we are asked, what is man? we reply, that he is a material being, organized, or framed, so as to feel, to think, and to be affected in certain ways peculiar to himself, according to his organization.”* M. Comte affirms, that "all natural phenomena are the necessary results either of the laws of extension or of the laws of motion." M. Crouse is quite clear that "intelligence is a property or effect of matter," and ventures on the very singular declaration, that "body and spirit together constitute matter." So, also, the English materialists affirm that "instinct, passion, thought, are effects of organized substances." Or, still more explicitly, "Mind is the consequence or product of the material man; it is not a thing having a seat or home in the brain, but it is the manifestation or expression of the brain in action, as heat and light are of fire, and fragrance of the flower." ||

*System of Nature.

+ Course.

Des Principles, pp. 84, 86.

"Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development."

Even Dr. Priestley teaches that "man does not consist of two principles so essentially different from each other as matter and spirit, but the whole man is of one uniform composition; and that either the material or the immaterial part of the universal system is superfluous."* Having adopted the principle of uni-substance in the universe, he seems to have been, for a time, doubtful whether he should spiritualize matter, and declare the one substance of the universe to be spirit; or whether he should materialize mind, and declare the one substance to be matter. But in his course toward error, he had already passed the point where "gravitation turns the other way;" and he soon sunk down into materialism. Yet, strangely enough, he still professed to believe the doctrine of man's immortality, and also of retribution in another life. So in the so-called spiritualism of the present day; it is thoroughly materialistic, while, at the same time, it assumes the style and title of spiritualism. A. J. Davis says: "Nature proclaims one of her great working principles to be, that spirit is evolved out of matter." But this refined nonsense is illuminated by one ray of true light, when it is admitted that this spirit "outlives the body in which it is educated."†

Less known than those quoted before, yet not less clear in the statement of this form of materialism, was Mr. Thomas Read, of New York. He says that "the manifestations of the soul, of life, of mind, of sight, thought, feeling, love, and envy, and the effects of electricity, sound, heat, and so on, are all alike the effects of physical, or, if you please, of material causes." Nor does he shrink from the extremest consequences of this materialism: "The soul

*"Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit."

"The Principles of Nature and Her Divine Revelations."
Immateriality of the Soul, p. 4.

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