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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



well as individual modes of conceiving. Is not 

 that " positive " too ? Will not men of science 

 agree with me that such is the fact ? In short, 

 our bodies, on any view of them, Science herself 

 has taught us, are percepts and concepts of ours — 

 I don't say of the " soul," or the mind, or any 

 bete noire of the sort, but of ourselves, who surely 

 cannot be altogether betes noires. They are as 

 much percepts and concepts of ours as is the ma- 

 terial world outside them. Are they colored ? 

 Color, we are told, is a sensation. Are they hard 

 or soft ? These are our sensations, and relative 

 to us. The elements of our food enter into re- 

 lations we name living ; their molecules enter into 

 that condition of unstable equilibrium ; there is 

 motion of parts fulfilling definite intelligible and 

 constant uses, in some cases subject to our own 

 intelligent direction. But all this is what appears 

 to our intelligence, and it appears different, ac- 

 cording to the stages of intelligence at which we 

 arrive ; a good deal of it is hypothesis of our own 

 minds. Readers of Berkeley and Kant need not 

 be told this ; it is now universally acknowledged 

 by the competent. The atomic theory is a work- 

 ing hypothesis of our minds only. Space and 

 time are relative to our intelligence, to the suc- 

 cession of our thoughts, to our own faculties of 

 motion, motion being also a conception of ours. 

 Our bodies, in fact, as positivists often tell us, 

 and as we now venture to remind them, are phe- 

 nomena, that is, orderly appearances to us. They 

 further tell us generally that there is nothing 

 which thus appears, or that we cannot know that 

 there is anything beyond the appearance. What, 

 then, according to positivism itself, is the most 

 we are entitled to affirm with regard to the dead ? 

 Simply that there are no appearances to us of a 

 living personality in connection with those phe- 

 nomena which we. call a dead body, any more 

 than there are in connection with the used-up 

 materials of burned tissues that pass by osmosis 

 into the capillaries, and away by excretory ducts. 

 But are we entitled to affirm that the person is 

 extinct — is dissolved — the one conscious self in 

 whom these bodily phenomena centred (except 

 so far as they centred in us), who was the focus 

 of them, gave them form, made them what they 

 were ; whose thoughts wandered up and down 

 through eternity ; of whom, therefore, the bodily 

 as well as mental and spiritual functions were 

 functions, so far as the body entered into the 

 conscious self at all ? We can, on the contrary, 

 only affirm that probably the person no longer 

 perceives, and is conscious, in connection with 

 this form we look upon, wherein so-called chem- 



ical affinities now prevail altogether over so- 

 called vital power. But even in life the body is 

 always changing and decomposing — foreign sub- 

 stances are always becoming a new body, and 

 the old body becoming a foreign substance. Yet 

 the person remains one and the same. True, 

 positivism tries to eliminate persons, and reduce 

 all to appearances ; but this is too glaring a vio- 

 lation of common- sense, and I do not think from 

 his language Mr. Harrison quite means to do this. 

 Well, by spirit, even by "soul," most people, let 

 me assure him, only mean our own conscious per- 

 sonal selves. For myself, indeed, I believe that 

 there cannot be appearances without something 

 to appear. But seeing that the material world 

 is in harmony with our intelligence, and presents 

 all the appearance of intelligent cooperation of 

 parts with a view to ends, I believe, with a great 

 English thinker, whose loss we have to deplore 

 (James Hinton), that all this is the manifestation 

 of life — of living spirits or persons, not of dead, 

 inert matter, though from our own spiritual dead- 

 ness or inertness it appears to us material. Upon 

 our own moral and spiritual life, in fact, depends 

 the measure of our knowledge and perception. I 

 can indeed admit with Mr. Harrison that proba- 

 bly there must always be to us the phenomenon, 

 the body, the external ; but it may be widely 

 different from what it seems now. We may be 

 made one with the great Elohim, or angels of 

 Nature who create us, or we may still grovel in 

 dead material bodily life. We now appear to 

 ourselves and to others as bodily, as material. 

 Body, and soul or mind, are two opposite phe- 

 nomenal poles of one reality, which is self or 

 spirit ; but though these phenomena may vary, 

 the creative, informing spirit, which underlies all, 

 of which we partake, which is absolute, divine, 

 this can never be destroyed. " In God we live, 

 move, and have our being." It is held, indeed, 

 by the new philosophy, that the temporal, the 

 physical, and the composite (elements of matter 

 and "feeling "), are the basis of our higher con- 

 sciousness : on the contrary, I hold that this is 

 absurd, and that the one eternal consciousness 

 or spirit must be the basis of the physical, com- 

 posite, and temporal ; is needed to give unity and 

 harmony to the body. One is a little ashamed 

 of agreeing with an old-fashioned thinker, whom 

 an old-fashioned poet pronounced the "first of 

 those who know," that the spirit is organizing 

 vital principle of the body, not vice versa. The 

 great difficulty, no doubt, is that apparent irrup- 

 tion of the external into the personal, when, as 

 the essayist says, " impair a man's secretions, 



