Page:A budget of paradoxes (IA cu31924103990507).pdf/289

 organisms from a very few, if not from one. The better heads abovementioned know that their theory, if true, does not bear upon morals. The formation of solar systems from a nebular hypothesis, followed by organisations gradually emerging from some curious play of particles, nay, the very evolution of mind and thought from such an apparatus, are all as consistent with a Personal creative power to whom homage and obedience are due, and who has declared himself, as with a blind Nature of Things. A pure materialist, as to all things visible, may be even a bigotted Christian: this is not frequent, but it is possible. There is a proverb which says, A pig may fly, but it isn't a likely bird. But when the psychological speculator comes in, he often undertakes to draw inferences from the physical conclusions, by joining on his tremendous apparatus of à priori knowledge. He deduces that he can do without a God: he can deduce all things without any such necessity. With Occam and Newton he will have no more causes than are necessary to explain phenomena to him: and if by pure head-work combined with results of physical observation he can construct his universe, he must be a very unphilosophical man who would encumber himself with a useless Creator! There is something tangible about my method, says he; yours is vague. He requires it to be granted that his system is positive and that your'syours [sic] is impositive. So reasoned the stage coachman when the railroads began to depose him—'If you're upset in a stage-coach, why, there you are! but if you're upset on the railroad, where are you?' The answer lies in another question, Which is most positive knowledge, God deduced from man and his history, or the postulates of the few who think they can reason à priori on the tacit assumption of unlimited command of data?

We are not yet come to the existence of a school of philosophers who explicitly deny a Creator: but we are on the way, though common sense may interpose. There are always straws which show the direction of the wind. I have before me the printed letter of a medical man—to whose professional ability I have good testimony—who finds the vital principle in highly rarefied oxygen. With the usual logic of such thinkers, he dismisses the 'eternal personal identity' because 'If soul, spirit, mind, which are merely modes of sensation, be the attribute or function of nerve-tissue, it cannot possibly have any existence apart from its material organism!' How does he know this impossibility? If all the mind we know be from nerve-tissue, how does it appear that mind in other planets may not be another