tinguishing himself from nature, and endowed with a directive and determining power by which he directs his own energies and reacts on nature to direct its energies to accomplish his own chosen ends. He is conditioned not merely in space and time but also in self-consciousness. Thus rising above nature he is self-conditioning, self-regulating and directing, self-determining and self-exerting. For this reason it is necessary to recognize him as a spirit, and thus distinct from and above nature. This recognition is scientific, because it is necessary to explain the facts certainly known in self-consciousness. As proving that man is spirit, Kant emphasizes the practical reason, the imperative of conscience. It is by no means the only evidence, but it is sufficient. The consciousness of duty is as immediate as any intuition of sense; duty implies free-will; free-will implies that man is spirit; the consciousness of duty gives contents in consciousness to the idea of God. The imperative of the practical reason commands the surrender of life itself to duty; this would be the extinction of the individual himself, if the individual is only in the course of nature; thus it is decisive evidence that, however implicated in nature, man is also spirit; he belongs to a realm transcending nature.

For similar reasons it is unnecessary to adopt the threefold classification of man as body, soul and spirit. Thus Aristotle (De Anima) distinguishes in man a lower soul not separable from the body, from the higher soul which is separable from it. The former he calls the Evrelésta of the body, that by which it is actually a living organization, the formative power which like an impression on wax gives form to the wax but has no existence separate from the wax. This is the subject of sensations and passions. But the higher soul, the or Oswprzezý dívapes, has transcendent powers, and therefore is "separable from the body, as that which is eternal and immortal from that which is corruptible."* This is well said, as disclaiming the doctrine of the Pythagoreans and Platonists that all souls, alike of animals and men, are immortal. But it is unnecessary to assume that this formative actuality of animated life, inseparable from the living body, is a soul. It is sufficient to say that man is a spirit acting in and through a living animal organization.

Mr. Lewes objects that the spiritual hypothesis is untenable, because it is unscientific. It is an imaginary hypothesis incapable of verification. It also attempts to account for phenomena by introducing an unknowable; "the spirit is proposed as an agent, yet of its nature and agency we know absolutely nothing." This objection is founded on the assumption that consciousness is not a source of knowledge; that

*Lib. I., Cap. I., and Lib. II., Cap. I.

man has no knowledge of himself and his own powers; that the objective alone can be known. The falsity of this position has already been exposed.

Mr. Lewes further objects that, if the existence of spirit is granted, it does not account for the facts. Man, he argues, possessing this spirit, but isolated from society, would remain without language, without the moral ideas of duty to others, without the "capitalized experience" of the race, and "could no more manifest the activities classed under Intellect and Morality than the animal could." The reasoning would be equally valid if he had argued that if there were no external world, material or mental, this man possessing spirit but existing alone, would have no knowledge of an external world or of other rational beings. The existence of spirit in man is not, as the objection assumes it is, incompatible with existence in society. If a spirit does not exist in society, it can have no knowledge of society and social relations; but if it does exist in society, it will have that knowledge. I cannot conceive of anything in this fact which could have presented itself as an objection in the mind of Mr. Lewes or of any other intelligent person. Mr. Spencer speaks of "the prevalent anxiety to establish some absolute distinction between animal intelligence and human intelligence;" the objections sometimes urged cannot but suggest a "prevalent anxiety" to subvert this common belief.

Mr. Lewes further objects that "the spiritualist hypothesis of an imaginary agent" is unnecessary, because all the facts "can be perfectly explained by a real agent-the Social Organism." When Spencer and Lewes say that society is an organism and attempt to construct a sociology on that principle, they overlook the difference between a race or species and an individual organism Moreover, they overlook the fact that the institutions, civilization and unity of human society can be explained only as those of a rational and moral system, not as those of a race of brutes. Thus they leave out the most essential and distinctive facts of human society. It is amusing to find Mr. Lewes speaking of this intellectual fiction, "the Social Organism," as a "real agent," and quietly setting aside as an "imaginary agent" the rational, free personality which every man knows in his own self-consciousness and the reality of which is an essential factor in all knowledge.*

Mr. Spencer objects that a babe at birth manifests no more rationality than a dog; that its development to rationality is by infinitesimal gradations; and that "there is a series of infinitesimal gradations. through which brute rationality may pass into human rationality." May pass but there is no proof that it does pass-a very common

Problems of Life and Mind. First Series. Vol. II., pp. 144-146, 54.

inconsequence in the arguments of skeptical evolutionists. Here also is the false reasoning which I have exposed in a former chapter, that powers belonging to the human mind must be measured by the powers of infants. The objection is set aside by two indisputable facts: the one that man has the attributes of personality, reason, free-will, rational sensibility, consciousness of self, which so far as we have evidence, brutes have not; the other, that every babe normally developed manifests these distinctive powers, and no brute however developed and trained, ever manifests anyone of them. Mr. Spencer further objects that savages are gradually developed to the civilized man. To which it is sufficient to answer that, according to the investigations and conclusions of Tylor, Quatrefages, Tiele, Feschel and other anthropologists, all savage tribes, however low, so far as known, have religiousness and the sense of moral obligation and distinctions, and otherwise manifest attributes of personality. Thus, as has been before shown, the difference between the highest brute and the lowest animal, being a difference of kind, is greater than between the lowest savage and the greatest intellect of civilized nations, the difference in this case being only of degree.*

* Spencer's Psychology, Vol. I., pp. 460-462 206.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE TWO SYSTEMS OF NATURE AND OF PERSONALITY.

? 82. A Person's Knowledge of other Personal Beings. I. WHAT a person or spirit is, man finds in his knowledge of himself and in this only. Man finds the entire contents of the idea of personality in his consciousness of himself in his own mental operations.

It is a principle already established that in the entire contents of human knowledge there is no element which has not been first given in intuition, perceptive or rational. Every element of the idea of person or spirit is given in man's consciousness of himself as an individual persisting in identity and endowed with reason, free-will and rational sensibility. No other element can enter into his conception of a person or spirit, any more than a blind man can have a conception of color. This is all the truth there is in the common assertion that all that man knows is derived from experience. The elements of all objects of thought must have been known through presentative or rational intuition before they became objects of thought. And every essential element in my idea of a person or spirit I must first have found in my consciousness of myself in my own mental operations.

or

This sets aside much empty speculation as to the origin of the idea of the spirit in primeval man. Such, for example, are the fancies that man obtained his idea of spirit from seeing his own shadow, from his own dreams, or from the wind which cannot be seen, or the stars which cannot be touched, or the sky which cannot be measured, or from the "great silence" of the forest. This kind of speculation has no support from observed facts. And why should we look so far for what is always obvious within? For in fact man has the spiritual always before him in his own consciousness of rational thought and sensibility and free determination. What, he asks, is swifter than thought? Every hour he is conscious of exercising energies which are invisible and of receiving pain and pleasure from invisible sources. And no outward thing could suggest the idea of spirit unless it had first arisen in the man's own conscious thinking, feeling and willing. It is often assumed that the idea of spirit is attained with difficulty and is late in making its appearance. It is not so. The idea appears

in

the most savage tribes; it exists spontaneously without conscious reasoning. When it is once originated in man's self-consciousness he carries it beyond himself; he believes in invisible spirits superior to himself and attributes a soul or spirit even to inanimate things. Thus a savage thinks that a watch is alive, or that a letter which he is carrying knows what he does and tells of it. And when one dies the survivors supply him with food and weapons, believing that phantom food and weapons will follow the soul of the dead into the land of spirits. Tylor says: "When Democritus propounded the great problem of metaphysics,' How do we perceive external things?' . . . he explained the fact of perception by declaring that things are always throwing off images (etowa) of themselves, which images, assimilating to themselves the surrounding air, enter a recipient soul and are thus perceived."... This is "really the savage doctrine of object-souls, turned to a new purpose as a method of explaining the phenomena of thought."* Man's idea of spirit arises spontaneously in his own conscious mentality. What he slowly learns is that the things active around him do not always contain a conscious agent invisible like his own thoughts.

Fetichism exemplifies the same fact; for the fetichist believes that any material object may be a shrine for the divinity. And this is in fact a spontaneous and unconsciously intuitive turning of the mind in the direction of a fundamental reality; for fetichism is a blind animism, recognizing in nature a spiritual and invisible power. Berkeley cites Toricelli as likening matter to an enchanted vase of Circe serving as a receptacle of force, and declaring that power and impulse are such subtle abstracts and refined quintessences that they cannot be enclosed in any other vessels but the inmost materiality of natural solids; he also cites Leibnitz as comparing active primitive power to souls or substantial form. To this day physical science does not profess to remove the mystery; it does not say what force is nor how it is related to matter; it only recognizes their observed concomitance. The most profound and satisfactory view is that which recognizes the absolute being as individuating its power in it, and in and through it progressively revealing itself in higher and higher forms.

Belief in spirit arises from man's knowledge of his own invisible energies, and is not of difficult attainment and late development; it appears to be spontaneous, constitutional, universal, and so tenacious as to be scarcely ever eradicated. It is worthy of note that when from any cause religious unbelief prevails among the learned, the belief in

Tylor: Primitive Culture. Vol. I., p. 449.

Berkeley: Concerning Motion; Works. Vol. II., p. 86.