A MODERIT "SYMPOSIUM." 



503 



therefore, let us hope, cannot be a " corrupting 

 doctrine." 



I am not helped out of the difficulty I have 

 thus candidly stated, when I try to get at the 

 meaning of another hard saying of Mr. Harri- 

 son's, which follows after the " corrupting doc- 

 trine " paragraph : " And all doctrines, more or 

 less, do tend to this [corrupting doctrine], which 

 offer physical theories as explaining moral phe- 

 nomena." 



Nevertheless, on p. 239, No. III., Mr. Harri- 

 son says with great force and tolerable accuracy : 



" Man is one, however compound. Fire his 

 conscience, and he blushes. Check his circula- 

 tion, and he thinks wildly, or thinks not at all. 

 Impair his secretions, and moral sense is dulled, 

 discolored, or depraved ; his aspirations flag; his 

 hope, love, faith, reel. Impair them still more, 

 and he becomes a brute. A cup of drink degrades 

 his moral nature below that of a swine. Again, 

 a violent emotion of pity or horror makes him 

 vomit. A lancet will restore him from delirium 

 to clear thought. Excess of thought will waste 

 his sinews. Excess of muscular exercise will 

 deaden thought. An emotion will double the 

 strength of his muscles. And at last the prick 

 of a needle or a grain of mineral will in an in- 

 stant lay to rest forever his body and its unity, 

 and all the spontaneous activities of intelligence, 

 feeling, and action, with which that compound 

 organism was charged. 



" These are the obvious and ancient observp- 

 tions about the human organism. But modern 

 philosophy and science have carried these hints 

 into complete explanations. By a vast accumula- 

 tion of proof positive, thought at last has estab- 

 lished a distinct correspondence between every 

 process of thought or of feeling and some corpo- 

 real phenomenon." 



I cry with Shylock : 



Tis 



very true, O wise and upright judg 



But, if the establishment of the correspond- 

 ence between physical phenomena on the one 

 side, and moral and intellectual phenomena on 

 the other, is properly to be called an explanation 

 (let alone a complete explanation) of the human 

 organism, surely Mr. Harrison's teachings come 

 dangerously near that tender of physical theo- 

 ries in explanation of moral phenomena which 

 he warns us leads straight to corruption. 



But perhaps I have misinterpreted Mr. Harri- 

 son. For a few lines further on we are told, with 

 due italic emphasis, that "no man can explain 

 volition by purely anatomical study." l I should 



1 P. 239. 



have thought that Mr. Harrison might have gone 

 much further than this. No man ever explained 

 any physiological fact by purely anatomical study. 

 Digestion cannot be so explained, nor respira- 

 tion, nor reflex action. It would have been as 

 relevant to affirm that volition could not be ex- 

 plained by measuring an arc of the meridian. 



I am obliged to note the fact that Mr. Harri- 

 son's biological studies have not proceeded so 

 far as to enable him to discriminate between the 

 province of anatomy and that of physiology, be- 

 cause it furnishes the key to an otherwise myste- 

 rious utterance which occurs at page 631 : 



" A man whose whole thoughts are absorbed 

 in cutting up dead monkeys and live frogs has no 

 more business to dogmatize about religion than a 

 mere chemist to improvise a zoology." 



Quis negavit ? But if, as, on Mr. Harrison's 

 own showing, is the case, the progress of science 

 (not anatomical, but physiological) has " estab- 

 lished a distinct correspondence between every 

 process of thought or of feeling and some cor- 

 poreal phenomenon," and if it is true that " im- 

 paired secretions " deprave the moral sense, and 

 make " hope, love, and faith reel," surely the re- 

 ligious feelings are brought within the range of 

 physiological inquiry. If impaired secretions de- 

 prave the moral sense, it becomes an interesting 

 and important problem to ascertain what dis- 

 eased viscus may have been responsible for the 

 priest in absolution ; and what condition of the 

 gray pulp may have conferred on it such a patho- 

 logical steadiness of faith as to create the hope 

 of personal immortality, which Mr. Harrison stig- 

 matizes as so selfishly immoral. 



I should not like to undertake the responsibil- 

 ity of advising anybody to dogmatize about any- 

 thing ; but surely if, as Mr. Harrison so strongly 

 urges, 1 " the whole range of man's powers, from 

 the finest spiritual sensibility down to a mere 

 automatic contraction, falls into one coherent 

 scheme, being all the multiform functions of a 

 living organism in presence of its encircling con- 

 ditions," then the man who endeavors to ascer- 

 tain the exact nature of these functions, and to 

 determine the influence of conditions upon them, 

 is more likely to be in a position to tell us some- 

 thing worth hearing about them than one who 

 is turned from such study by cheap pulpit thun- 

 der touching the presumption of " biological rea- 

 soning about spiritual things." 



Mr. Harrison, as we have seen, is not quite so 

 clear as is desirable respecting the limits of the 



» P. 239. 



