Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/112

Rh

Finally: The true conception of God, as this appears to me, and especially in his relation to us, is closely bound up with the absorbing question of Immortality. And on this I surmise that Professor Royce and I differ; though I am less sure that we do, judging by his hints of what is coming in his more esoteric lectures next week. But in his book he gives up the question of Immortality as insoluble by philosophy. Well, — perhaps it is; but upon this question, as upon that of Evil, I think a great light is thrown by the evolutional view of the origin of man.

Until recently, man’s mind was studied wholly apart from mind as appearing in all the rest of Nature. Thus an elaborate system of philosophy was built up without the slightest reference to the psychic phenomena of animals. The grounds of our belief in immortality were based largely on a supposed separateness of man from brutes — his complete uniqueness in the whole scheme of Nature. This is now no longer possible. If man came by a natural process from the animal kingdom, — his spirit from the anima of animals, — then the psychical phenomena of man should no longer be studied apart from those of animals nearest approaching him. As anatomy, physiology, and embryology became scientific only by becoming comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, and comparative embryology, so psychology can never become scientific and rational until it becomes comparative psychology — until the psychical phenomena of man are studied in comparison