Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/709

 We are no more free to disturb the harmony and beauty of the universe than are the stars in their courses or the planets in their orbits. Our courses and orbits are no less fixed than theirs, and it is but the imperfection of our knowledge, if they have not been, and cannot yet be discovered. But it would be a lamentable blot upon a universe, where all things are fixed by a Power "in whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning," were there permitted to exist a race of creatures who were a law unto themselves.

Again, the relation now established between the human mind and the ultimate Source both of mind and matter, serves to throw light upon that dark spot in the hypothesis of evolution—the origin of consciousness. For while in this hypothesis there is a continual progression, of which each step is the natural consequence of another, from the gaseous to the solid condition of our system, from inorganic to organic substances, from the humblest organization to the most complex, there is absolutely no traceable gradation from the absence to the presence of conscious life. No cunning contrivance of science can derive sensation from non-sentient materials, for the difference between the two is not a difference in degree of development, but in kind. There is a radical unlikeness between the two, and it is unphilosophic, as well as unscientific, to disguise the fact that a mere process of material evolution can never lead from the one to the other. "The moment of arising of consciousness," says Mr. Shadworth Hodgson, "is the most important break in the world of phenomena or nature taken as a whole; the phenomena above and the phenomena below it can never be reduced completely into each other; there is a certain heterogeneity between them. But this is not the only instance of such a heterogeneity" (Hodgson's "Theory of Practice," vol. i. p. 340). I venture to say that it is the only instance, and that there is nothing else in nature which can properly be compared with it. The instances of similar heterogeneity which Mr. Hodgson gives appear to me less carefully considered than might have been expected from so careful a writer. That between Time and Space, which is his first case, is involved in that between mind and matter, and is only another expression of it (see supra, p. 447); while "curves and straight lines," and "physical and