MAN'S TERRIBLE RESPONSIBILITY 121 Is life good or evil? Does white or black triumph? He can speak for himself alone: all external to himself was meant to be suspected. Insect that he is, feeding on a leaf an inch square, he has no power to pass at will into his fellow's world, or enter into his sense of black and white. How can he pass into the life lived by his neighbour, and live that life? And because the world is each man's own world, so he is responsible for the use he makes of all its content. The glory of the sun and sky, the floral robe of mother earth, and the beauty of mountain, plain, and sea are his; the wisdom and the lore of earth's wisest and holiest are at the disposal of his head and heart, and God will one day demand to know how all this has been employed. What is the product of the world for every one? Browning marvels at the great thought "How the world is made for each of us! How all we perceive and know in it When a soul declares itself—to wit, By its fruits, the thing it does!" 1 1 By the Fireside. CHAPTER VII THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE WHAT is this principle which differentiates us from the beast? We have never seen it, it escapes our scalpel, eludes our analysis, and cannot be detected by our microscopes. But neither can the life-principle which differentiates the plant from the stone, nor the plant from the animal. We can see and handle matter only, yet we do not doubt the existence of life because we fail to discover what it is. Yet for this reason some scientists, for the most part of the inferior sort, have rejected the idea of the soul in so far as it is considered beyond that of the lower animals. It is no whit harder to believe in soul, though we cannot lay hold of it, than to believe in life, instinct, thought, though nobody has captured either and put it under glass in our museums. "Oh, but evolution accounts for everything," they say. Says Browning "Evolutionists! 'Tis the tip-top of things to which you strain THE MYSTERY OF LIFE Your vision, until atoms, protoplasm, And what and whence and how may be the spasm 123 Ah, but I shall be told, Browning was a poet not a scientist. Very well, then, let us listen to the words of a distinguished biologist. Professor Lionel Beale says 2" The tiniest speck of living matter exhibits no structure to account for its actions, and it contains no machinery. It belongs to a system altogether different from the mechanical world. It is not in the least like a clock, for no two of its 'ticks' are alike. Every one of its molecules makes its own wheels and cranks and springs and pendulum, and sets itself going and winds itself up, and makes new clocks, and in a moment, as perfect and as powerful and as strong as the parent, and all this though completely destitute of works or machinery of any kind. And there are millions of such molecules in the most minute parts of every living organism; many of them acting in harmony, now tending one way, now another; now appearing to obey gravitation, now moving, and with equal velocity, in defiance of the great law." 1 Parleyings with Francis Furini. 2 Life Theories and Religious Thought, p. 39. 124 MAN MORE THAN AN ANIMAL And this is all that science has to tell us about life. Does this bring us any nearer to the mystery of life than Browning's "spasm which sets all going" and stops us in our search? He tells us that God stands behind the infinitely little— "We find great things are made of little things, The materialist tells us that "molecular machinery," "infinitely complicated chemical properties," "transmutation of physical forces," account for all the processes of life, anything rather than confess with Browning that "the Name comes close behind the simplest of creations." 2 Man, then, has a soul. We must take this for granted; he is therefore more than matter. He has a free and rational soul; he is therefore more than an animal. He has an immortal soul; and is therefore above the material world which perishes. By soul we mean more than the principle of life, which man possesses in common with lower organic forms. Browning defines the soul as consciousness "Call consciousness the soul Getting itself aware through stuff decreed THE MATERIAL AND THE IMMATERIAL 125 This stuff we call the body. "Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but above." 1 It converts "human clay to divine gold," and "works through the shows of sense," "and through the fleeting lives, to die into the fixed." "A spark of soul hides beneath the veriest ash."4 We have tried to find this spark. "Physiologists had very good reason for deny. ing the existence, even in man, of an immaterial principle numerically distinct from the living body, and à fortiori they had and have very good reason for denying the existence of any such distinct entity in lower organisms. The conception here advocated, however-that of an immaterial principle and a material substance, as much 'one thing' as 'heat' and 'iron' in a redhot poker are one thing-is open to no such objection. Every form of energy is absolutely and necessarily unimaginable by us save in terms of extended bodies-fluid, gaseous, or what notor of our own activities as revealed in reflex consciousness; and therefore the individuating, immaterial psyche of each creature must be absolutely unimaginable. But we may be none the less sure of its existence; as we are sure of the existence of heat, though we can never imagine it-except as a quality of some extended body or of our own sensitive faculty. We are quite 1 The Ring and the Book: “The Pope,” 1. 1353. 2 Ibid. 3 Fifine at the Fair, 4 Ibid. |