LECTURE III.

THE IDEA OF SELF, OR PERSONAL EXISTENCE.

THE object of my last Lecture was to draw a dividing line between the provinces of Philosophy and Religion; to show that the one was occupied with abstractions, and the other with realities; and, accordingly, that they rested upon different species of evidence, and any confusion of the two was likely to be injurious to both. During the reign of Scholasticism, says Mr. Whewell, "it was held, without any regulating principle, that the Philosophy which had been bequeathed to the world by the great geniuses of heathen antiquity, and the Philosophy which was deduced from and implied by the revelations made by God to man, must be identical; and therefore that Theology is the only true Philosophy." We do but invert this error in our own day, when the opinion of many seems to tend towards the conclusion, if indeed it be not openly avowed, that Philosophy is the only true Theology. Against this conclusion, I endeavoured to show, by a very brief review of the questions that are chiefly considered by metaphysicians and by religious inquirers, that they differed as widely from each other as logic from history, so that reasoning from one to the other was not merely feeble and unsatisfactory, but irrational and absurd. The great truths of Religion are the being of a God, the moral government of the world, the immortality of the soul, and the promulgation of certain duties as directly enjoined by the authority of God. These truths, I reminded you, for no proof of a self-evident proposition is

needed or possible, are matters of fact, quite as much so as the existence, at some antecedent time, of a certain political community upon this earth, the authority of its first magistrate, and the enactment of laws by its legislature; that is, we rely upon sensible evidence, the testimony of others, and upon reasoning from effects to causes, the usual media of physical and historical inquiry,—for establishing our belief in their reality.

This division is not made because of the superior sacredness of religion, but simply to avoid confusion of terms and illogical conclusions. We are not entitled to claim any thing for theology beyond what is proved; and to repudiate any kind of reasoning simply on the ground of the irreverence of its application to such a theme, or even of the pernicious results to which it leads, would be an assumption alike unreasonable and unfair. I take nothing for granted. The inquiry, hitherto, has related solely to the logic or method of the investigation;-not to the validity of particular arguments used for a special purpose, but to the proper classification of all arguments, and to the explanation of the terms which must be used in the reasoning. Thus, I have not yet sought to prove the being of a God, but to show what is the meaning of the question, whether God exists. The idea of religion, also, not its verity, has been assumed according to the common understanding of men, in order that we may know the nature of the problem before us, and not pursue an aimless discussion, or end in conclusions of no practical importance.

Considering these preliminaries as established, we approach now the body of the subject, and attempt to prove the particular facts in the case, and to free them from the metaphysical speculations and difficulties by which they have been encumbered. In seeking to know the relation of God to man, we must begin by an investigation, to some extent, of human nature itself, as our conclusions upon this point cannot fail to affect every part of the inquiry. What are we, considered as subjects of the Divine law, and what light is thrown by our physical constitution upon the purpose or end for which we began to exist? or is it likely that there was no purpose in the case, but that our creation was as

objectless as the gambols of an infant,

a mere freak in the disposition of matter? The common belief, that man is a complex being, made up of body and soul, has been disturbed by strange doubts respecting the possibility of any immaterial existence, and by arguments which go to destroy our confidence even in our personal identity, and consequently in our continuous responsibility to any authority. I do not say, that a solution of all these doubts is absolutely necessary before the great truths of religion can be established. Dr. Priestley was a materialist, yet he believed in the immortality of man; he was a necessarian, but he held to human accountability; and few who are familiar with his theological writings will deny that he was even a profoundly religious person, whatever may have been his errors in scientific, political, or theological speculation. Still, it was for him to vindicate his own consistency; in ordinary minds, if such opinions are not immediately destructive of all religious belief, they certainly tend to darken and perplex it, so that a consideration of them cannot properly be omitted here. The principles already laid down do not permit us to waive the discussion as metaphysical, and therefore out of place; for the point of inquiry is a fact, the continued, identical, conscious existence of a human being, his personality, the reality of a man to himself. Metaphysical skepticism has gone so far, that, before undertaking to establish the existence of a God, we are called upon to prove our own existence. In considering the argument upon this head, lest I should be accused of breaking my own rules, let me remind you that the testimony of consciousness has been admitted to be as legitimate a source of knowledge in physical inquiry as the evidence of the senses themselves.

In the attempt to disprove the doctrine of materialism, it has been usual to adopt the argument to which I briefly alluded in a former Lecture;—to say that mind is the seat or subject of certain phenomena which are entirely distinct from another class of attributes or qualities which inhere in matter. What that substance is, in either case, we cannot determine, for our knowledge both of mind and matter is merely relative. As "we know the

one," argues Mr. Stewart, "only by such sensible qualities as extension, figure, and solidity; and the other by such operations as sensation, thought, and volition; we are certainly entitled to say, that matter and mind, considered as objects of human study, are essentially different; the science of the former resting ultimately on the phenomena exhibited to our senses; that of the latter, on the phenomena of which we are conscious. Instead, therefore, of objecting to the scheme of materialism, that its conclusions are false, it would be more accurate to say, that its aim is unphilosophical."* Accordingly, it is maintained to be "no more proper to say of mind that it is material, than to say of body that it is spiritual."

This argument may be very well as far as it goes; but it seems to me to be insufficient, and to be very like an attempt to console us for our imperfect knowledge of one thing by reminding us of our total ignorance of another. Besides, as mind and matter are confessedly the only constituents or parts that make up the human being, it is rather humiliating to be told that we have only a relative knowledge of ourselves. When informed that matter is only the unknown substratum of certain qualities, we may acquiesce; for it has been shown that this idea of matter in general is a mere abstraction, and if it were lost altogether, it would be no serious privation, our knowledge of particular substances remaining precisely what it was before. But when a person is told that he is only an unknown something which feels, thinks, and wills, he is very likely to reluct at the conclusion, inasmuch as he considers his own existence, not as an abstraction, but a reality. The argument puts our knowledge of the material and the intellectual world exactly on a par, so that the idea of personality is left unprovided for, or it is doubtful whether the body or the mind is the person.

Let us look farther, then, for an argument against materialism founded on the absolute incongruity of mental phenomena with material organization or change. He who denies the existence

*Philosophy of the Human Mind, Am. (Cambridge) ed., I. 4.

of spirit must maintain that ideas and emotions are evolved, in some unintelligible manner, by the action of some part of the body, probably of the nerves or the brain. Now we cannot conceive of any changes in these organs corresponding to the infinite variety of mental phenomena, except by the motions of their parts. But motion is not thought; the vibrations of the nerves, the agitation of the brain, the reciprocal action of infinitesimal particles on each other, is still bodily action, and not mental action. Granting, for a moment, for the sake of argument, that they produce, or evolve, thought, they are not thought, any more than the striking of a hammer on a bell is sound, or, than the opening of the eyes is vision. A cause can never be confounded with its effect, even though it be the real or efficient cause, and not a mere invariable antecedent or concomitant

event.

Let me illustrate this point a little further. Chemists and mathematicians have long been occupied with researches and speculations concerning the nature of heat, or caloric; at present, they can only say of it, that it is an invisible and imponderable agent or principle, which produces certain effects, the words "agent and "principle," be it observed, being used only for convenience of speech, and really betraying the ignorance of the speaker, who does not know whether heat is some subtile fluid, existing by itself, and tending constantly to an equilibrium by emission in straight lines, or whether it proceeds from undulations, or certain changes resembling undulations, in a fluid which exists also for other purposes; the heat in this case not being material, and never existing by itself, so that we should speak of a hot body or a cold one, just as we speak of a smooth surface or a rough surface, never supposing that smoothness is a substance, but an attribute. Now, suppose that some uninformed person, observing that heat was always evolved when one body was rubbed against another, or when it was burned, or when it was condensed from a gaseous to a liquid, or from a liquid to a solid state, should say that the problem was solved, and that heat was unquestionably nothing but friction, or combustion, or condensation. A chemist