STUDY XVII.

MAN ORIGIN, NATURE, LANGUAGE, CIVILISATION.

"I cannot but believe, that, if we would so regard the ills and sufferings of man as to endeavour to assuage them, we must deliver ourselves from notions, however plausible, and from theories no matter how clever, which reduce him to the level of the beasts that perish."—Address in British Medical Association, Norwich, 1874J. RUSSELL REYNOLDS, M.D., F.R.S.

"Beata vita nisi amatur, non habetur."

THERE was an old superstition which saw in Nature the action of capricious deities; there is a modern superstition which sees nothing but the action of invariable law; both being regardless, or ignorant, that everything done in Nature manifests a knowing how to do it.

Ancient seers ascribed even the gentlest, most constant, as also the mightiest works of Nature, to the operation of God. "The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath He established the heavens. By His knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew" (Prov. iii. 19, 20). "God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them" (Gen. i. 27). We do not, nor did the wise ancients, think that a likeness was moulded in plastic clay of the spiritual and invisible God. Ancient and modern thought regards the words and act as symbols expressive of some special operation in the creation of man, and of his separateness from all other creatures.

We have been curiously fashioned by natural forces into animal life; and by mysterious influence, of external operation and interior assimilation, enabled to bridge the gulf which separated earth-life from consciousness of Divinity. There is something very tender in the words "God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life." They endue the ideal image with vitality, and awake it into consciousness by a kiss of

Separation of Man from Brute.

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love. They are the poetic simile of a Divine process, a loving symbol of Divine action, a contrast of God and man, spirit and flesh, soul and body, the sweet summing up, réλoç, of all things. The fact may sustain the superstructure of various thoughts.

Our never being able of ourselves to originate any form of mental activity; no one ever acquiring the creative power of genius, or making himself a great artist, or a great poet, or gaining by practice that peculiar insight which characterises the original discoverer; shows that these are mental instincts or spiritual intuitions.' What we can do is—call upon our will by "purposive selection," by attention, by direction, to train, utilise, and perfect natural gifts; therefore, spirit is placed within the body, and subjected to the internal mechanism of thought and feeling for discipline of the whole man.

Thus separated psychically and pneumatically from the brutes, we are enabled to pass from the Fiji, who delights in the shrieks of his human victim, to that higher kind of selfpleasing which leads a man to risk his life in rescuing even an enemy from drowning, and to consecrate his body and soul to God. This action of sympathy and love and reverence is not selfish, though sacredly self-pleasing, any more than the workings of Shakespeare's genius are, but reflex actions of that, whatever it be, which forms the groundwork of canine cleverness. Not only so, as human emotion and intellect have their roots in the past, indeed are partly animal, partly human, running down into the earth out of which we were taken, and by upward growth soaring toward Heaven; there is reason to think that our powers not beginning with the present conscious existence will not end with it. Every man's consciousness, both for good and evil, not being the product of one body, but an effect wrought by human progress during the past-the inference is that our end, whether as to soul or body, is not byand-by. The leaves of our life-book contain writings of former ages, the present issue, or edition, does not complete the series; there will be a further reprint, a quickening of intelligence and extension of memory, by mysteriously regulated advance, to higher correspondence with the Eternal Spirit of "Mental Physiology," p. 25: Dr. W. B. Carpenter.

the universe. Memory may possibly be plenary, no longer a place of sepulture for the remains of many generations, but a habitation of thought endued with the power of endless life (I Cor. xiii. 12).

This "Plenary Memory" will lead to higher processes of life, the measure of which will be our capability and fitness. Unclouded by fumes of laboratories, untainted by sensual appetite, unhindered by life's ills and weaknesses, we may presume that we shall not travel by the present methods of logical reasoning, but be nourished and grow up in truth by a sort of mental assimilation. The process being somewhat akin to the present work of the Holy Ghost (John xvi. 13). The soul, combining with itself every element of knowledge, alway moving on, not wasting organic force, will advance into the continuous power of knowing more and more. The spiritual faculty, discerning all the links of the great chain which binds diversity of operation into unity of wisdom, will gather every luxury of love and knowledge.

Accepting "Development" as a fact, we hold that " Adam is the princeps, and so the ideal prius of the creaturely world." " Using the idea of "Natural Selection," so far as it conceives an intelligent work in the world, the conversion of the lower into the higher by heredity, adaptation, variation, distribution, we maintain that man is something more than a material organism. His structure, wonderful as it is, does not even approximately represent his essential nature. With a certain difference in structure, between the lower apes and the gorilla, we find a moderate and measurable difference of nature; but, with a less marked difference of structure between the gorilla and man, we have an immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of nature. Man's chamber of consciousness is the meeting-place of the material and the spiritual, he forms antithetical conceptions of both, correlates their energies, and in part understands the meaning of the wonderful machinery of which he is a portion.

Now change and enlarge the view-Man, as the highest

3

1 "The Physical Theory of Another Life," p. 79: Isaac Taylor.

2 "Lange on Genesis," p. 211. English translation.

"Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," p. 103: Prof. Huxley.

animal, is an actual microcosm, represents the whole of life in the world. Represents it as being of the earth, and taken from the ground; yet excels it not only by possession of superior mechanism, but in the use of mental and moral faculties. Considering his mechanism, we find that it is an improvement of all that had gone before; but the organism in many respects nearest to him, the Anthropoid Ape, the Gibbon in particular rather than the Gorilla, is not a diminution of that which would otherwise have become human; but a formation by lateral and diverging operation which, however long continued, could never arrive at man. "The two series, ape and man, diverge from one another . . . the youthful individuals are more alike than the older ones . . . the ape, as he grows, becomes more bestial; man more human."1

The moral and spiritual powers, summed up in one word, Soul, cannot be explained by the material properties of protoplasm, nor find an equivalent in mechanical adjustment, nor is the soul made up of psychical bits which have passed through the life and mind of lower animals. The dog possesses attention, abstraction, imagination, judgment, desire, grief—indeed, a share of many intellectual faculties and emotional passions. "The dog, the cat, the parrot, return love for our love, and hatred for our hatred; they are capable of shame and sorrow; and, though they may have no logic nor conscious ratiocination, no one who has watched their ways can doubt that they possess that power of rational cerebration which evolves reasonable acts from the premises furnished by the senses-a process which takes fully as large a share as conscious reason in human activity." The soul is very much more than this. When we can conceive the nature of matter apart from its properties, when we know the embodiment of the inner man, when we know our spirit as a habitation of the Living God, then we may begin to investigate the nature of the soul; at present we have neither power to understand it nor words to describe it.

The withering conclusions of atheists as to the mortality of

"Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism :" Prof. Schmidt.

the soul are unwarrantable and unscientific: if matter cannot be annihilated, it appears highly unscientific to assert that the spirit in man, which subdues and rules matter, is of less enduring nature. Moreover, the principle of the conservation of energy is antagonistic to the utter loss of that great mental energy which subjects to itself the physical world. The cause of these effects cannot be annihilated. We pity that flippancy which contemns this high spiritual gift; and pray not only for the unwise who would refuse, but for the rash who despise the glorious distinction. It is a mystery, and the small vessel of our human reason, able to receive it as a gift, is utterly unable to comprehend its nature.

"It cometh from afar

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our Home."

William Wordsworth.

We are rudely aroused from our joy in this perpetual benediction of Heaven, and degraded by grovelling hypothesis to bestial fellowship. We are as some scion of a noble house suddenly told "You are not of honourable birth, you lie down with a dog-twist, your laugh is taken from the hyæna, your song from the mocking-bird, your tears from the crocodile, and your speech from the rudiments of animal cries. You are not a child of God, morally and intellectually endowed; you crawled into existence through many brutal shapes

"When men first crept out of the earth, a dumb and filthy herd, they fought for acorns and lurking-places with their nails and fists; and, then, with clubs; and, at last, with arms which, taught by experience, they had forged. Then they invented names for things, and words to express their thoughts, after which they began to desist from war, and to fortify cities and to enact laws."

We will not multiply classical quotations, writers of our own