80 Tr ansae Lions . — Miscellaneous . 



the right of private judgment stopped short at the precise 

 point that it did ; and how, in the eighteenth, the Eclaircisse- 

 ment, in the main hostile to Christianity, identified itself with 

 what is, in truth, a Christian doctrine — the equal rights of all 

 men. 



Applying this point of view to theories of the nature and 

 genesis of the world, it seems, on reflection, sufficiently mani- 

 fest that the conception of it as a mechanical system is a com- 

 plementary one to the belief in the existence of a mechanician 

 outside it. Yet the philosophies which most vehemently 

 assert the necessary invalidity of the belief in a God w^ho 

 made the world as a man makes a watch are those which, 

 with equal assurance, assert the possibility of our remaining 

 satisfied wath the conception of the world as a watch, but 

 without any maker. Such a standpoint, however, can be only 

 a transitional one. If there is no mechanician, then the world, 

 it is plain, is something very different from a mechanical 

 system. "The brain secretes thought," we are told, "as 

 the Hver secretes bile." Let us suppose that it does: the 

 question next arises. How does the liver secrete bile ? It 

 plainly will not do to conceive of it as secreting it in anything 

 like the same way or manner as that in which the steam- 

 engine converts heat into motion. It must be conceived of 

 rather as secreting it in the manner in which the engine, phis 

 the man endowed with conscious will and intelligence who 

 attends it, effects this end. If there be nothing to take the 

 place of the man alongside the organisan, then the organism 

 itself cannot be viewed except in one of two ways— either as 

 something that has an independent life of its own, or as some- 

 thing that shares the life of some wider existence. 



We speak freely of some things in the world as "living," 

 and of others as "dead" and "inert"; but if w-e force our- 

 selves to consider what it is we really say when we use such 

 expressions we will find that we can never combine the 

 predicates of "deadness" and "inertia" with the predicates 

 of motion and change as applicable to any subject without 

 having in the background of our minds the thought of some 

 cause outside such a subject that moves and changes it. Once 

 convince us fully that no such cause exists, and its motion 

 becomes at once for us sufficient evidence of its life. If there 

 were nothing in the universe, we are told, but two drops of 

 water, and they were millions of miles apart, they would not 

 rest where they are, but would at once begin to move in a 

 straight line towards each other. We can conceive of such a 

 fact under the category of mechanism only, because in the 

 semiconscious background of our minds there is the tra- 

 ditional thought of a God who moves them. Blot out that 

 thought completely and the drops of water become at once 



