law to all finite beings, and is not a mere uniform factual sequence which we call a law of nature; and the free person is not exempt from it, for he is the cause of his own free acts, and himself as finite derives his being from God and depends on him for his existence. But his action is free and is not in the necessary sequences which constitute the course of nature.

IV. A person, considered as distinguished from matter or as hypermaterial, is called Spirit.

Our knowledge of person as already defined is clear and positive. All its elements are known within our own consciousness. But when we designate a person as a spirit in distinction from matter, the proposition is liable to be misunderstood.

On the one hand, theology does not deny of the finite spirit all relations to space. The relations of body, of the finite spirit, and of God to space, were respectively designated in the older theology by the Latin adverbs, circumscriptive, definitive and repletive.* By these terms, which Turretin already perceived to be inadequate, theology denied of the finite spirit solidity and divisibility, which are characteristic of bodies, and immensity or omnipresence which is predicable only of God, and affirmed of it a definite form and position in space. So Tennyson:

"Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside."

It is not essential to spirit that it exist and act separate from matter. All that is essential is that the properties and powers peculiar to a person are not properties and powers of matter; they transcend matter and its forces and cannot be accounted for by them. It is therefore possible that spirit acts in and through a material organization; and if all finite persons thus act it does not prove that they are not spirit. Even God expresses his thought and reveals his glory through nature. Immanent in the universe his power, wisdom and love are continuously revealed in it. In the loom of time he weaves the garment by which we see him. Spirit is the source of power and of the wisdom and love which direct its energies. And it is not inconceivable that the finite spirit, as a subcreative centre of reason and free power, may weave for itself a material vesture, of ethereal texture and from fitly elaborated matter, through which it acts and by which it is revealed. Any power which acts can cause only effects, which as effects are conditioned in space, or time, or consciousness, or quantity, or dependence. Not otherwise can it reveal itself.

* Turretin: Institutio Theologiæ Elenetica; Loc. III., Quæst. ix.

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Hence nature is always the symbol and revealer of spirit. As already shown, nature is the sphere in which the human reason and will act, and furnishes resources and agencies for their action. And in it God, always immanent, acts revealing his glory. Matter is not contradictory to spirit, but the object and sphere, the organ and the instrument of its action. The impassable chasm between dead matter and spirit, the irreconcilable antagonism between them, can no longer be found.

On the other hand the word matter does not have a fixed and definite meaning. This is partly because the word is used indefinitely; partly because those who define it do not agree in their definitions; and still more because an exact and complete definition must determinately answer questions, both empirical and metaphysical, which man has not at present the means of deciding.

It is idle to use the arguments against materialism founded on paswhat Lange calls, "The old notion of matter as a dead, stark and sive substance." Matter is now regarded as dynamic rather than pas sive; and the materialism of the present day is founded on the doctrine of the persistence of force. Matter as conceived by the current materialism is that which occupies space and is contained in it and which thus has the properties of solidity, extension, form and position; but it is always in motion; rest is relative only to the particular system to which the apparently resting body belongs. Force is the cause of motion; or, if the phrase is preferred, it is that which is manifested in motion; all force is measurable by motion, the mass and velocity being the factors. The quantity of force, potential and kinetic, is always the same. By the impact of moving bodies force can be communicated and its manifestation transformed into a new mode of motion; but no force can be added to or subtracted from the existing amount. The inertia of matter remains in the fact, as stated by Grove, "that a force cannot originate otherwise than by devolution from some preSuch is matter objectively considered as the existing force or forces."* current materialism conceives it.

Matter subjectively considered is that which is perceptible by man's senses; or is of such a nature as to be conceivably perceptible by The materialism more acute and powerful senses of the same kind.

of the present day is the affirmation that matter and force as above defined are all the reality of which it is possible for man to have knowledge; that they constitute the universe and account for all its changes; that what we call mind and mental phenomena are no exception; and that there is a complete correlation and inter-convertibility of mental phenomena and the physical processes going on in the brain.

*Correlation of Physical Forces: p. 19.

In view of the current dynamic conception of physical phenomena, this materialistic monism is evidently distinguishable from materialism in some of its previous historical forms. But it is the same in its practical issue. In contradiction to this materialistic monism I affirm that the activities of personality, certainly known to us as facts, reveal an agent or power other than and different from matter and the energy which is manifested in motion and measured by it. A person, considered as thus distinguished from matter and its motor-energy, is called spirit.

76. Man is a Personal Being.

Man knows himself to be a person, endowed with rational free-will and all the essential attributes of personality, and, as such, a subject of moral obligation and capable of moral conduct and character. Man knows this with the highest certainty; on the knowledge of this all other knowledge depends for its reality, its continuity, and its unity.

The fact of man's personality has been established in the preceding chapters, and needs no further discussion.

In his personality every man is individual and alone; others can approach the barriers of this solitude and send in intelligence, influence, or sympathy; but no man can scale the barriers into the personality of another to think, or feel, or determine, or act for him, to take his responsibility, or to participate in his consciousness. There is much in every one's consciousness which, even without any purpose or effort to conceal it, is hidden from those most intimate with him.

"Yes; in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know."

And to the same purport is the Hebrew proverb: "If thou be wise thou shalt be wise for thyself; but if thou scornest thou alone shalt bear it."

Whatever difficulties may be involved in the assertion that man is spirit, the fact of his personality stands out in clear, definite and certain knowledge. And because he is a person he is a moral agent and a supernatural being.

877. Man is Spirit.

Though man in his physical constitution is implicated in nature, yet in his personality he is spirit, supernatural and hypermaterial.

If materialism is to stand it must account for and explain all the

facts, both of personality and of the physical universe, by matter and its motor-force alone; failing to do this it is discredited as a theory of the universe. We must distinguish between accounting for and explaining by empirical science and by philosophy. A reality is explained and accounted for empirically when it is classified by resemblance and co-ordinated in a uniform sequence. Factual realities thus cognized in empirical science are accounted for and explained philosophically when they are interpreted and vindicated to the Reason by declaring the rational thought which they express, the rational law to which they conform, and the rational ideals and ends which they tend to realize. I propose to prove that the facts of personality and of the physical universe cannot be accounted for or explained either empirically or philosophically by matter and its motor-force.

I. The existence of spirit is necessary to account for and explain the facts of personality. Matter and motor-force cannot account for and explain them.

1. The properties and powers of personal beings are different from the properties and powers of matter; therefore there must be a spiritual agent or cause manifesting itself in personality, distinct and different from matter and the force which manifests itself in motion. Intuitions of self-consciousness and of reason, free choice, love, are not identical with motion nor with any change of matter which is resolvable into motion. Spirit is distinguished from matter by peculiar essential properties. We cannot distinguish substances by going behind the properties. Substance has no meaning divested of the properties in which it is manifested. We know substance only as a being persistent in certain properties or powers. We have then the same kind of reason for supposing the being or agent revealed in personal properties and acts to be a kind of agent different and distinct from matter, which reveals itself in force causing or arresting motion, as we have for supposing that oxygen is a different kind of being or agent from hydrogen. And the distinction and difference are more complete because the activities of oxygen and hydrogen are ultimately brought into the same class as modes of motion, while the activities of personality cannot be identified with motion, and the personal agent is thus distinct and dif ferent from all agents whose activities are solely modes of motion. Hence, as Dr. Carpenter says of spirit and matter, "the essential nature of these two entities is such that no relation of identity can exist between them."*

2. The supposition of the existence of spirit as the cause or agent manifested in the known facts of personality and necessary to

* Mind and Will in Nature: Contemporary Rev. 1872.

account for them, is entirely accordant with the methods of physical science.

Science recognizes at present sixty-four simple or elemental bodies. It assumes that the atoms of each of these have certain peculiar and unchangeable properties by which these elements are each distinguished from the others. "The diversity of matter results from primordial differences perpetually existing in the very essence of these atoms, and in the qualities which are the manifestation of them." When in the known facts of personality we discover properties and activities differing from those of each of these elements and of all matter, especially in the fact that they are not modes of motion, we do but adopt the legitimate and uniform method of physical science in ascribing them to an agent or cause distinct and different from matter and its energy. There is nothing more difficult or unscientific in distinguishing the agent revealed in these phenomena from matter than in distinguishing the substance revealed in the phenomena of potassium from carbon or iron. We distinguish spirit as the agent in personality from all bodies, because the qualities in which it manifests itself are different from those of any and all bodies.

The scientific recognition of molecules, atoms, and the ether shows still more strikingly that our recognition of spirit as the agent manifesting itself in the phenomena of personality is accordant with the legitimate and customary method of empirical science. In ascertaining the essential reality of all that is presented to the senses, empirical science goes behind all which men commonly have in mind when thinking of matter to reality entirely imperceptible by the senses. this it seems to find a sort of " thing in itself," the essential but hidden reality of all that is presented to sense. As the essential reality of matter it finds molecules and atoms; of sound, undulations of air; of heat, light and electricity, vibrations of an all-pervading ether. In each case that which science finds as the essential reality of matter and energy is that which is imperceptible by sense. The essential reality of the tangible is the intangible; of the audible is the inaudible; of the visible is the invisible; of the divisible is the indivisible; of the perceptible is the imperceptible. Thus underlying or within the gross matter and its motions which we perceive, is a world of atomic, molecular and ethereal matter which no human sense can grasp.

In this, science presents to our thought a reality of which we can have no perception and scarcely even a conception as matter. The atom itself, as some represent it, is no longer an infrangible mass "in solid singleness," as Lucretius described it and as Newton con

* Wurtz: The Atomic Theory: Cleminshaw's Translation, p. 308.