Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/340

326 nostrils the breath, of life"? Was the soul, too, created by evolution, or was that at least a "special creation"? We are here, be it observed, going beyond the range of our subject, which was the relation of Darwinism to the Christian faith, and passing into a region where neither science nor religion has spoken. Dr. Pusey says "theology does not hold transformist theories excluded by Holy Scripture, so that they spare the soul of man." But science spares the soul of man, just as it spares original creation, because it can not have any knowledge of either. It can deny both. What is there that man can not deny? It may even cover its dogmatic denial by a semblance of reason with the help of the major premise: "What science can not know can not be known." From this, no doubt, the conclusion follows with logical necessity. But we answer with negatur maior. With regard, however, to the question of the origin of the soul, as a theological problem, it is perhaps easier to say what is not true than what is. The soul can not be a "special" creation whether in Adam or in his children. There is no "species" of soul. We may call it, if we will, an "individual" creation; but is not all creation individual creation from the religious point of view? And if so, it is a phrase which does not help us.

We can, however, explain the difficulty in precisely the same way in which science explains a law—namely, "by substituting one mystery for another." We may say that there is no actual or conceivable difficulty in the creation of the soul of Adam which does not recur in the case of every child born into the world. Is its soul inherited, like its bodily organism, or is it added to the body? The instincts of Christianity, rather than any formal decision, have throughout been against traducianism, or the inheritance of the soul. Creationism, or the infusio animæ, on the other hand, guards a truth which traducianism loses. But in spite of all the authority which can be claimed for it, it sounds crude and strange, to our ways of thinking. The very word infusio, and, in a lesser degree, the barbarous word "insufflation," suggest that the soul is a thing which at a definite though unknown moment is put into the body "like a passenger in a boat," as Aristotle has it. If so, the body before the advent of the soul was not in any real sense human. For "the reasonable soul" is as essential to true humanity as the "flesh." And if the analogy suggested in the Athanasian Creed justifies us in appealing to that greater mystery, on which Christian thought, in defense of the faith, has been compelled to speculate and define, we have to remember that it is heresy to assert that "that Holy Thing," which in the fullness of time was to be born of the