Life and Mind 65 



Buchner, another German, says: 



"Mind, like light, heat, electricity, or magnetism, is a move- 

 ment of matter." 



The late Ernest Haeckel, the famous German materialistic biologist, 

 in his book "The Riddle of the Universe," says that neither mind nor 

 soul have any origin, because sensation is an inherent property of all 

 substance, and that conscious soul is a mere function of the brain. It 

 is worth something that these gentlemen recognize that mind has an 

 actual existence, even if they do degrade it to a mere function of one 

 of the bodily organs. In animal physiology, a function of an organ of 

 the body is simply its normal mode of action, and therefore necessarily 

 involuntary and automatic. The bodily organs all have their functions. 

 The heart, the lungs, the stomach, the liver, and the kidneys, have each 

 their functions or their normal mode of action ; and none of them can 

 voluntarily refuse to act or change the manner of its acting. They act 

 automatically. The action of the mind, therefore, according to these 

 men, is simply the normal automatic action of the brain, as diges- 

 tion is the normal and automatic action of the stomach. In animal 

 physiology, a secretion is a substance existing in the blood, which is 

 prepared and separated therefrom by glandular activity or by the action 

 of the epithelial cells, as milk is separated from the blood and secreted 

 by the mammary glands. To follow their argument to its legitimate con- 

 clusion, we might say that as all the organs of the body are built from 

 the food we eat, and perform their functions by the power thus gen- 

 erated, and as all the bodily organs are produced from that same food, 

 mind and thought really originate in the stomach, and that organ is 

 the abiding place of the soul. 



According to these learned gentlemen, therefore, the mind is a mere 

 function of one of the organs of our body, as dige.stion is a function of 

 another. Our much vaunted thinking and reasoning is only a secretion 

 that oozes from our brain, as the tears ooze from our lachrymal glands 

 while we weep over the dismal hopelessness and purposelessness of human 

 existence as thus pictured by these scientists; and their erudite pro- 

 ductions are no more than material exudations from their material 

 brains. 



The works of these materialistic writers, showing as they do that 

 they are the result of much study, are alone sufficient to refute their 

 conclusion. This is particularly true of the work of Haeckel. His 

 work is not the production of a mere automaton. When we read the 

 record he made of his lifetime studies in the field of biology, we know 

 that it is not a record of the mere involuntary working of a bodily func- 

 ■ tion. Every page evidences purpose and design ; an individual and per- 

 sonal purpose and design that could not possibly find its origin in a mere 

 ' dily function. The existence of this purpose and this design is as 

 obvious in that work as is the existence of purpose and design in the 

 work of the Infinite Intelligence that is over all. The immediate and 

 impelling power by which the various bodily functions perform their 

 several offices, is life, — that force which builds the body. But life only 

 follows the plan it finds in the germ with which its work begins. It 



