BOOK III.

THE SPIRITUAL REASON.

CHAPTER I.

First, Reasoning is not Reason; this illustrated.-The composition of human nature is not double, but three-fold.-Man having an Animal Mind and a Spirit, these faculties in him correspond to two worlds, the world of the Seen and that of the Unseen.-Hence two reasoning powers, the "Animal Mind" and Spiritual Reason. Moral ideas are received from Society by the Reason. All ideas of which it may be said "God is," are of it.-A remark in reference to our future state, and the grounds of our perpetual progress in it. The question of innate ideas.

OUR readers will have remarked that among the "governing" powers, as we place Conscience the first, so the second is the Reason. To examine the nature and laws of this faculty, therefore, shall be the object of the present book.

The subject we acknowledge to be one of considerable difficulty, and yet we believe to the reader who shall give us his considerate attention, we shall be able to bring forth the laws and offices of this great power so that the principles educed may be something of a guide to him in his course of moral study as well as in actual life practically. The first distinction we would have him observe is this, that "reasoning" and Reason are things wholly and entirely different, so different indeed that very often considerable powers of reasoning shall exist in him who has of Reason very little at all.

A strange paradox, one may say, and yet literally possible,reasoning is properly a logical exercise, the power by which, "premises" being given or assumed, we draw the conclusion-this is "reasoning." Now if we look at the definition of insanity, we 17

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find it is "that *madmen reason rightly from wrong premises.' The reasoning power is unimpaired in them, the Reason is diseased. And this is so well known among physicians attending upon such persons, that it is a rule never to "reason" with them; and that because their "reasoning" powers are very often even more perfect and vigorous than ordinary, while their Reason is diseased. diseased. This shows that there is a real distinction between "reasoning" and Reason.

But, indeed, it is ordinary to mark it, the man who is forever arguing, proving, disputing; in short, he that has a taste for "reasoning," this man seldom we find reasonable, and seldom attribute Reason to him. So far we have gone, and as there are two ways of explaining what we mean, and the first is that of fencing off outwardly from our conception that which does not belong to it, so we beg our readers to mark this first, the distinction that soning" is not Reason.

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Having thus noticed the verbal distinction which our readers will find brought out still more strongly afterwards, we go on to examine what Reason is in its own nature.

And here we must be permitted to enter into an examination of a point which is of very great importance to the question in hand, as well to the whole question of Christian ethics, the investigation and decision of which, according to the truth of Christianity and Nature, we count absolutely necessary to a true Ethics-and this is the composition of that which we have called "Human Nature," as to its parts. The individual being that we call a man, of how many parts is his "Human Nature" compounded? "Of two," at once it is answered; and these two are "body and soul."

And they that give this answer undoubtedly will be very much astonished to learn that it is not so; that the two-fold division of Human Nature is not the one given in Holy Writ, but a three-fold division, and that that three-fold partition is not only in express terms made by an Apostle, but also uniformly observed; so that the division of man's nature is not into Body and Soul, but into "Body," "Animal Soul," and "Spirit," a division three-fold, not two-fold. "I pray God your whole spirit, (vivua, pneuma), and soul, (xn, psuche), and body, (aua, soma), be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."+

This refers strictly to maniacs or monomaniacs, not to idiots.

†1 Thess. v. 23. See upon this passage the commentary of the great Eng

So that here the constituent parts of our nature are enumerated as three, as furthermore when we go through the Scriptures we find that there are in the original three adjectives derived from these three parts, employed to denote three different classes of men or natures, not two. If there were only two kinds of nature, the one "spiritual," under the influence of God's Spirit, and the other "totally depraved," as it is called, of course there would be only two, the "spiritual" and the "carnal," (pneumatikos and sarkikos). But there are three, (pneumatikas,) spiritual, (psuchikos,) animal, and (sarkikos,) carnal. "Carnal" being those who are under the dominion of the body and its lusts and desires; "spiritual," they who are under the Spirit of God ruling their spirit; and "animal," they who are as animals, are indifferent to all religious feeling, insensible and unawakened, with no spiritual perception and no spiritual feeling.

Having gone so far, we need not say that the doctrine which this treatise adopts, is that in Human Nature there are the three parts "Body," "Animal Soul," and "Spirit."* It remains to

lish theologian and saint, Dr. Henry Hammond, in Patrick, Lowth and Whitby. He calls this the ancient and true philosophy; shows that all the noblest heathen philosophers held it, and also that those eminent fathers of the Church, Clement, Origen, and Irenæus, were of the same opinion. He declares, too, that the conflict between the Spirit and the flesh cannot be understood without believing in an Animal Mind; and that the governing power in us cannot be comprehended except we suppose a spirit, an inferior animal soul, and a body—a tripartite existence in man. He furthermore shows how, because of following this mind of the flesh, the man is styled Juzɩxòs, the animal man; and the body, before the resurrection, is the "animal body," as after it is the "spiritual" body.

* Perhaps I may add to this another illustration. The Jewish commentators, some of them translate thus: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of two lives, (nephesh chayim,) and man became a living soul;" a translation of which the original is unquestionably susceptible.

This, then, will imply in man two principles of life; the one the psuchè, or animal soul, which he has in common with the beasts, the mere brute life, with the faculties that belong to it, and the other the spiritual life, which belongs to man peculiarly as a spiritual being. Original sin will thus be expressed as a mortal wound of the spiritual life, whereby the animal mind, with its desires, becomes enabled as against an enfeebled master, to become insubordinate. And thus the spiritual life in man is so diseased, that

a Gen. ii. 7.

apply these principles to the elucidation of the point in hand, of the Reason as a moral power, or the "Spiritual Reason," as we call it, in opposition to the "Understanding," or, as in this treatise we should choose to call it, the "Animal Mind."

Now taking it for granted that there are these three divisionsof "Body," "Animal mind," and "Spirit,"-man has the three, the beasts have the two. Whatsoever then we find in the beasts of mental power, that is in man also, this may be considered as belonging to them in virtue of the "Animal Mind;" and in man it is not as Spiritual, but as Animal,-but those powers which man has and they have not, these may be considered as peculiarly spiritual. The powers, then, on the one side of this line, we consider to belong to the "Animal Mind," the others to belong to the "Spiritual Reason."

Now we do not ask this matter to go upon speculation, we are content that it should go upon experiment. And we say this upon the best authority that, acccording to the experiments of the best natural philosophers, there is no operation of the mind that may not in kind (we do not say in degree,) be traced in the Animals, save only moral ideas. So far, then, have we gone closer to the real difference of the "Spiritual Reason," and the "Animal Mind;" the one deals with moral ideas, the other is excluded from them.

This deduction we have before established, but now we would limit it so as to express it more clearly in reference to the "ReaWe have before shown that there is an Animal Mind, and its functions we can determine by a consideration of the sphere from which its impressions are derived.

Now, when we look at the Universe, at once we feel and know that it is of two parts,-the one Corporeal, the other Spiritual,the one Visible, and the other Invisible,-the one Finite, the other Infinite, the one of the senses, the other above the senses. In one word, that there is a world material, corporeal, visible, in every way as to itself and its objects, limited in Space and Time: and that we will not say side by side with this world of sense, but

except the man receive healing from the Word, he will die the second death, undergo that unquenchable and unrevealable Death Eternal, which is the real death, the substance that, backward into the world of Time, casts that shadow that we call death.

co-existing along with it there is another world of things unseen, incorporeal, spiritual.

Of these two Worlds, their being and their co-existence, we offer no proof. The universal belief of all men, in all ages, is for it; the natural instinct of the heart of the youngest child, and the highest and surest persuasion of the broadest-winged intelligence, all unite in believing, all agree in asserting that man is a dweller in two worlds, the world of the Senses, and that of the Unseen and Infinite.*

Not that God made a world material wholly and acting machinelike, and put man in it, shutting out the Spiritual and keeping it somewhere apart, (an idea or notion, upon which a great deal of modern education is founded,) but that with the Natural World actually and really the Spiritual World co-exists, (we use the phrase only in a figurative sense, in order to express that the impressions, sensations, emotions, and teachings from the one are just as many, just as great, just as close to us as from the other.) This Spiritual world co-exists with the Natural one, and as man, one being, lives in the one, so does he live in the other, an idea which is clearly the persuasion of universal human nature, and the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures.

True it is that man dwells in two Worlds, so that, applying to the Infinite appellations that belong to Space, and Time, and Body, and therefore are only figuratively correct, the Spiritual

* The Platonists make two worlds, "The world of the things of Sense," "The world of the things of Spirit." The Hebrews named the universe by two words implying the same thing, "heaven and earth,”—that is to say, the whole compass of the world, things spiritual and things earthly, they expressed by naming the two extremes. And not until Pythagoras, had the ancient Greeks any other name for the whole; he invented the word, “Cosmos," as a name for the universe, which we translate world, but really means "the harmonious whole." As identical with this phrase, "heaven and earth," the Greeks used also the words, "all things visible and invisible." This also is in St. Paul: "By him are all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be,"* &c. He speaks to the Jews in their phrase, to the philosophic Greeks in theirs, asserting to both that God is the creator of THE all.

And in the Nicene Creed we recognize the same distinction, that the created universe is composed of two parts, the "Spiritual world," and "the world of Sense," when we term God the Father, “Maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

Col. i. 16.