WILLIAM G. STEVENSON. 29 
human brain; while feeling, action, thought, directed 
by an imperial will, come upon the stage of life as the 
products of its working. 
There is, however, no fact known to inductive or de- 
ductive reasoning which authorizes the conclusion that, 
because the brain is the organ of thought and feeling, 
therefore, they shall perish when it is dead. 
We cannot, it is true, ‘‘have direct evidence as to the 
soul’s survival until we ourselves die ;*’ ‘‘but a negative 
presumption,’ says Fiske, ‘is not created by the ab- 
sence of proof in cases where, in the nature of things, 
proof is inaccessible.” 
It may be that 
‘*God never meant that man should scale the heavens 
By strides of human wisdom.” 
If man be regarded simply asa ‘“‘local incident, in an 
endless and aimless series of cosmic changes,’ 1t may 
well be thought that ‘‘that which befalleth the sons of 
men befalleth beasts’? . . and ‘‘as the one dieth, so 
dieth the other.’ But we have seen that cosmic and bi- 
ologic changes are not aimless; and that an omnipotent 
intelligence directs the affairs of the universe. There- 
fore are we persuaded to believe that, while man—so 
‘‘fearfully and wonderfully made’’—is, in his bodily 
perfection, the crowning glory of organic evolution, the 
human mind—in its actualities and possibilities—is the 
consummate flower of creative purpose. 
The mind as a ‘“‘part of the system of nature” 1s 
‘specially adapted to the purpose of catching and 
translating into thought, the light of truth as embodied 
in surrounding nature,’? and consciousness is a ‘‘ mo- 
mentum of thought’? which, as Spencer says, ‘‘ carries 
us beyond conditioned existence to unconditioned ex- 
istence.’’ 
