Spiritual Evolution of Society 1 9 1 



tion, and the conservation of energy ? These laws of 

 matter are a necessity of life upon the earth and the 

 continuity of the machine, but apart from conscious life 

 they need not be regarded, and for all we know may 

 be mere transient agencies ; they are the seen and the 

 temporal ; what of the unseen and the eternal ? 

 Why does he not penetrate the things of the mind ? 

 Why is he miserable, we repeat, when he is cruel and 

 unjust, or greedy and unscrupulous ? Why is he happy 

 when the cause of happiness in others ? These things 

 far transcend the laws of dead matter ; considering 

 the transitory nature of human life and the terrible 

 misery of a large proportion of mankind, the thoughts 

 of the best minds are far more important than the 

 forces of matter. Such things as thought and the 

 law of righteousness are entities which neither Pro- 

 fessor Lankester nor anyone else has any right to 

 put aside. How did conscience arise ? Why did con- 

 science evolve if it came only in later days ? How is 

 man impelled to self-sacrifice ? Why are men and 

 women to-day giving their lives to raise the standard 

 of well-being among the poor and miserable ? These 

 are not bodily secretions or excretions. They are not 

 mere brain products — the result of chemical action in 

 the cerebral nerve cells ; no doubt this is the medium 

 of their evolution and transformation into speech, 

 but it is absurd to postulate that conscience and self- 

 sacrifice are the result of chemical change in the 

 cerebrum — and nothing more. Such statements are a 

 travesty of science and only bring it into contempt. 

 These entities are knowable, and yet beyond sight, 

 taste, smell, sound, or sensation. They rest upon 

 consciousness, which implies thought, which implies 

 intuition; and intuition implies a something apart 

 from the body and its purely physical functions, and 

 we are quite entitled to call it spirit or soul, if we so 



