Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/435

Rh what power its motion is continued after it leaves his hand, does not show that he is not the cause of the killing.

If the knowledge of the intermediate changes is a necessary condition to the exercise of the power which produces the final result, what becomes of the hypothesis of causation by material movements, or forces, which know nothing? In regard to the special phenomena in hand, it would seem that no power less facile, or less variable and adjustable in its application than that of intelligent effort, could be adequate; and that no blind power or force, the effects of which must of necessity be uniform, could, from the same conditions, produce such diverse effects as those attributed to the man and the frog.

Considering the clear line of demarcation which there is between those cases of change for which we are conscious of making effort and those for which we are not, I do not see how the discovery of any number of cases of the latter discredits the testimony of consciousness as to the former. All this exhibition of material phenomena, then, really weighs very little on either side of the question as to the existence of intelligent or material causality; and this little, I think, may be fairly claimed on the side of the intelligent.

There is another criterion which, as Prof. Huxley, in applying a somewhat analogous test, has very appropriately said, "though it could not be used in dealing with questions which are susceptible of demonstration, is well worthy of consideration in a case like the present." I cannot demonstrate, but I have great faith in the proposition that all progress in truth will increase the happiness and conduce to the elevation of man. I also have some faith in the converse of this proposition—that whatever tends to diminish our happiness and degrade our position will be found to be not true.

In this case, by adopting Prof. Huxley's views, we should be deprived of all the dignity of conscious power, and with it of all the cheering and elevating influences of the performance of duty; for that which has no power can have no duties. Instead of companionship with a Superior Intelligence, communicating his thoughts to us in the grandeur and beauty of the material universe—the poetic imagery, of which it is the pure and perfect type and in his yet higher and more immediate manifestations in the soul, we should be doomed to an inglorious fellowship with insensate matter, and subjected to its blind forces. That sublime power—that grandeur of effort by which the gifted logician, with resistless demonstration, permeates and illuminates realms which it tasks the imagination to traverse; and that yet more God-like power by which the poet commands light to be, and light breaks through chaos upon his beautiful creations, would no more awaken our admiration, or incite us to lofty effort. We should be degraded from the high and responsible position of independent powers in the universe—co-workers with God in creating the future—to a condition of mere machines and instruments operated by "stimuli"