Then she says to him:

Just at this moment, therefore, he is not thinking of killing Banquo, but wishes him to be received with all honor. But, in answer to his last reflection on the hypocritical part that they must act, she says to him:

Then bursts forth the terrific oppression of his soul:

She affects not to understand him—perhaps does not—and she asks:

In the next scene, the murderers, previously engaged by Macbeth, waylay Banquo in the park as he is approaching the castle, and kill him, his son Fleance and a servant escaping. Then follows the banquet, Macbeth himself moving about at first, and then he takes a seat at the table lower down. One of the murderers comes in and whispers to him what has been done. The stage direction is, "The ghost of Banquo rises and sits in Macbeth's place." As no one at the table but Macbeth sees this apparition, it might be inferred that it is the force of his imagination which presents the spectacle to him, as Lady Macbeth supposes, when she says to him:

But the stage direction must be taken as a literal appearance of the ghost, so as to make it visible to the audience, while it is invisible to all at the table excepting Macbeth himself.

If, now, we go forward to the night when Lady Macbeth is walking in her sleep, and remember what had occurred previous to and at the banquet, we see how, without any actual previous knowledge that her husband intended to have Banquo killed, and with only the surmise that he had been killed, which comes to her at the banquet, she came to say to her husband, in her dream:

Here we have a fact lodged in the mind during the waking hours, and in sleep wrought into a strange mixture with the killing of Duncan, with which it had in reality no connection, having transpired afterward. This is very strong proof of the capacity of the mind to act during sleep without the action of the brain. The mind of the guilty sleep-walker is filled with horrible memories, which it can not shut out, but with which it can not deal in their actual order and true relations, because the sequences of thought, during sleep, are abnormal. Those whose experience has never involved any such workings of conscience are perfectly aware of the fact that in dreams ideas that are separately lodged in the consciousness become entangled with each other in the most fantastic manner. Lady Macbeth at one moment even thinks of herself as if she were some one else, and asks, Where is the woman now who was the wife of the thane of Fife? Every one has experienced in sleep the same projection of one's self out of one's own consciousness; so that we seem to be contemplating ourselves as if we were a different person.

The phenomena that occur during the delirium of fever, where the normal consciousness is lost for the time being, are in some respects analogous to and in some respects different from those which occur during the somnambulistic condition. Delirium occurs when the body and the brain are not in the condition of sleep; but the senses of perception convey false impressions to the mind, and the mind itself has temporarily lost its power of correcting its own action by its former experience. The nearest friends who are around the bedside are not recognized by the sufferer; they appear to be strangers, and the patient talks to them as if both they and he were not their real selves. It would seem that we can safely infer from the state of delirium a suspension of the direct and normal connection between the brain and the mind; that neither of them can act, in relation to the other, as they both act when there is no such disturbance: but that this condition, so far from proving or tending to prove that the mind is not an independent spiritual existence, has a strong tendency to prove that it is. Insanity, on the other hand, is probably a derangement of the mental organism akin to derangement of the physical organism, but not necessarily connected with or induced by the latter, for the bodily health of the insane is often entirely sound while the mind is in an entirely unsound and irrational condition. But the phenomena of insanity are too various and multiform, and too much dependent on both physical and moral causes, to afford any satisfactory proofs of the postulate which I propound in this essay. The safest line of investigation is that which I suggested in the first instance, namely, to regard the mind as an organism, and to ascertain whether it is susceptible of anatomical examination in a sense analogous to anatomical examination of the bodily organism. All that I have hitherto said is useful by way of preliminary illustration of my main hypothesis. It has a strong tendency to show that the mind, instead of consisting, as some philosophers now suppose, of the products of a material organism, is itself an organized being with a definite structure and capable of living a life of its own, although at present dwelling in a corporeal organism which affects it in various ways while the connection lasts. The theory that all mental phenomena are products of our corporeal organism is one that appears to derive great support from examinations of the structure of the brain and of the whole nervous system. The physical anatomy of man exhibits very striking illustrations of the influence of corporeal changes upon the mental state, as the mental changes show corresponding influences upon the corporeal state. But, then, there are undoubtedly phenomena that are purely and exclusively mental; and therefore when we undertake to solve these mental phenomena by the materialistic hypothesis we find a sense of inadequate causation confronting us so directly that we are compelled to look for a solution elsewhere. It is certain that things take place in the inner recesses of our minds, in the production of which the bodily senses not only render no aid, but in which they have no part whatever. It is necessary, therefore, to carry our investigations into a class of mental phenomena in which all physical causation ceases to afford an adequate guide to a conclusion.

It will not be denied that the products of material organisms can be proved to consist of matter and of nothing else. Their presence can be detected by some physical test. For example, if it be true that all animals have been evolved from protoplasm, the organisms are simply changes in the form of a certain portion of matter. If, in an individual organism having a highly developed nervous structure, there are actions produced by an excitation of the nerves of sensation, those actions are simply molecular changes in the matter comprising the sensitive and easily moved substance of the nerve-fibers. However far and into whatever minutiæ we carry our investigations into organized matter, we find that its products remain material, and that they consist only of changes in the material substance of a material organization. But, when we pass from such material products into the domain of purely mental phenomena, are we warranted in saying that, although the latter are not, properly speaking, products of the material organization, they are effects corresponding to and dependent upon the excitation of the nerves of sensation? This last hypothesis must assume one of two things: either that there is a distinction between those corporeal feelings which do not and those which do produce mental changes or mental effects, or, if there are corporeal feelings which produce corresponding mental states and mental action, there must be a something on which the effects can be wrought, and this something must be an independent organism. It is doubtless true that there are many corporeal feelings which are followed by no very important mental effects, especially during a sound state of bodily health. But it is equally true that, if there are corporeal feelings which influence our mental action, there must be an organism which is capable of being so influenced; and our experience and consciousness teach us that there is such a difference between corporeal feelings and mental phenomena that the probability of a difference in the originating causes becomes very great. We know that the mind can and does act with great force when bodily suffering is extreme; that it has an energy of its own which enables it to rise above all the power of physical pain to restrain or influence it. I must therefore follow out, as I had originally projected, my anatomical analysis of the mind as an independent spiritual organism.

In order to arrive at a correct conclusion concerning the structure of mind, we must first observe that there are four special corporeal organs by which the capability of the mind to receive impressions from matter is acted upon. It is through these means that the properties of matter, or those properties which can make themselves known to us, become known to us. The senses, as they are usually called, are sight, hearing, smell, and taste. The external organ of each of these senses is furnished with a set of nerves, the function of which is to transmit from that organ a wave of molecular motion along the fluid or semi-fluid substance inclosed in the nerve-tubes to the great nerve-center the brain, the central recipient of all such motions. Such, at least, is the theory, which may be accepted as a fact. But, then, the question remains, What is the intellectual perception or mental cognition of the idea suggested by one of these supposed transmissions of a wave of molecular motion? Is there a being, a person, a spiritual entity, conceiving the idea or having an intellectual perception of it? Or is there no such being, and while we attribute to the office of the nervous system the function of producing certain feelings or sensations in the brain, do these sensations or feelings constitute all that there is of consciousness?

It is impossible for me to conceive of consciousness as anything but an intuitive sense of his own existence, experienced by a being capable of such an experience, because endowed with such a faculty. It is certain that when we so regard consciousness we are not deceiving ourselves; for if any one will consider what would happen to him if he should lose this faculty of being sensible of his own existence, he will see that in the event of that loss he could neither distinguish himself from other persons, nor have any control over his own actions, or any cognition whatever. For this reason, the theory on which I made some criticisms in one of our late conversations is the one with which I contrast my conception of mind. If that theory fails to satisfy a reflecting person in regard to the nature of consciousness, as certified to him by his own experience, the hypothesis that the mind is an extended and organized being, of which a conception can be formed, and not an unextended and unorganized something of which no conception can be formed, must be accepted as the alternative.

I explained in our former discussion my understanding of Mr. Spencer's theory of the only ego that can be scientifically recognized; and, in order to encounter it by my own hypothesis, I will here restate its substantial position in a condensed form.

By the ego of which he treats, I understand him to mean all that we can arrive at by an analysis of what takes place in the body and its functions, and of "what is given in consciousness." This phrase—"what is given in consciousness"—reveals to us his purpose to reduce consciousness from a self-conviction and cognition of one's own existence to a mere passing group of feelings, which constitute "the ever-changing states of consciousness" that we "call mind." So that, when we speak of mind, we mean and can mean nothing more than certain states of feeling produced in our brains by perpetually changing impressions. We do not and can not mean that there is a person who perceives and holds ideas suggested by external objects through the action of his nervous system. All that we know about any ego, any mental I, is that there is a physical structure, pervaded by certain physical forces, that produce "consecutive states," which Mr. Spencer calls "mental states"; and the aggregate of the feelings and ideas which thus constitute the mental states is the only ego of which any continued existence can be predicated. But even these aggregates of feelings and ideas have, according to this philosopher, no principle of cohesion holding them together as a whole; and, therefore, all that we can assume as having any continuously surviving and durable existence is the changing states produced by the action through us of a certain unknowable power, statically conditioned in our nervous organism, which is pervaded by a dynamically conditioned portion of that unknowable power which is operating everywhere in nature, and is called "energy."[149]

So far as this theory is based upon the existence of a physical organism, whose functions liberate from the food supplied to it certain forces, which are distributed by the activities of the organism, we may accept it as a statement of what actually takes place in the form of physical phenomena. But when we follow the physical phenomena of the diffused energy into its action upon the brain, by the transmission of an impulse, we must stop with the effect of that impulse upon a corporeal organ, or we must go further and find a something which receives into itself and appropriates to itself the idea the elements of which the impulse has transmitted. The presence of that something in ourselves may be illustrated by its absence from a mechanism in which we know that it does not exist, but which appears superficially to be animated by an intelligent principle possessing volition. We stand, for example, before one of those automatic machines which perform actions that seem to be guided by a living spirit. They are mere physical organisms, constructed without the principle of life that inhabits animal organisms, but they are so admirably contrived for the production of certain limited but complex movements that they suggest the presence of a spiritual being acting as we ourselves act. But the least reflection upon what we see makes us aware that there is nothing before us but a mechanical organism, in which the artisan who made it has availed himself of certain forces of nature and properties of matter, whereby he uses a portion of the energy that pervades the universe. There is nothing within the machine to which this energy communicates ideas that are to be the subject of its future voluntary operation. All is comprehended in a fixed mechanical operation of certain machinery, and, when we have analyzed and understood the physical phenomena, we can follow them no further, because there is no translation of the physical energy into mental phenomena. But in ourselves there is such a translation, and we must follow it into the mental phenomena. So following it, we find ourselves in the presence of a something which has a self-conscious individuality, and which, by a mysterious bond of connection, is so united with a physical organism that it is capable of receiving, appropriating, and preserving the ideas which the physical organism was designed to produce in it.

My objection to Mr. Spencer's system of psychology may be summed up in what I shall now say upon his chief position, which is that "an idea is the psychical side of what, on its physical side, is an involved set of molecular changes, propagated through an involved set of nervous plexuses." Translated into what I take to be his meaning, the assertion, or hypothesis, is this: An idea is the mental cognition of an external object, as, for example, a tree. When we are looking at or thinking of a tree, we have a mental cognition of a tree; and this idea of a tree is said to be the psychical side of that which on its physical side has been transmitted to our brain by molecular changes through our visual nerves. The idea of the tree is the psychical correlative of a wave of molecular motion diffused through our organs of vision; and the conception of a tree thus becomes a possible conception. But why did not the learned philosopher follow the wave of molecular motion until he found the impression of the object which the visual organs have transmitted to the brain, or the nerve-center, translated into a thought by an intelligent being, capable, by its own organization, of having that thought? Why does he speak of an idea as the psychical side of what, on its physical side, is one and the same thing? Obviously, because he meant to ignore the psychical or mental existence as an independent existence, or as any existence at all. Now, there is no way in which the psychical side and the physical side can be bridged over, excepting by the hypothesis that the mind is an entity of a peculiar nature, different in structure from the bodily organism, but capable, by the connection between them, of receiving and transmuting into thought the impressions which the waves of molecular motion transmit to the brain from the external object. To say that the set of plexuses, or networks, which hold together the waves of molecular motion, constitute the potentiality of the idea and make possible future ideas like it, explains nothing. The potentiality of the idea, or the possibility of ideas like it, depends upon the existence of a something which is capable of conceiving the idea, holding it, and reproducing it to itself, after the waves of molecular motion cease. I call this a process of translation, or transmutation, because there is no other convenient term for it. It is a process analogous to the physical assimilation of food by the organs of physical digestion, with this difference, however, that the action of the mental organism in the assimilation of ideas is the action of a spiritual and intellectual organism upon materials that are brought within its reach by the means of communication with the external world afforded by the physical senses and the nervous system. The image of the tree produced upon the retina of the eye by the lines of light that proceed from every point of that object is the food which the mind assimilates and transmutes into the idea of the tree; and this may remain as a permanent mental perception or cognition, although the object itself may have been seen but once. If seen many times, the various aspects in which it has been seen are transmuted into so many distinct ideas. If many kinds of trees, of different shapes and dimensions, have been seen, the varieties become a part of our consciousness in the several degrees of their precise resemblances and differences which we happen to have observed, when the different impressions were produced upon the retina. Can there be any doubt that this is the process by which the infant begins to acquire ideas of external objects, and that, as adolescence goes on and the powers of sense expand with the growth and exercise of the physical organs, there is a corresponding growth and expansion of the mental powers?

This hypothesis of the progress of mental growth, paris passibus with the growth of the physical organism, brings me to the consideration of one of those specimens of Mr. Spencer's peculiar logic, in a passage in which he undertakes to disprove the existence of mind as anything more than what he calls the psychical side of physical impressions. He is treating of the impossibility of our "knowing" anything about the substance of mind; and he propounds this impossibility in the following logical formula:

...To know anything is to distinguish it as such or such—to class it as of this or that order. An object is said to be but little known when it is alien to objects of which we have had experience; and it is said to be well known when there is great community of attributes between it and objects of which we have had experience. Hence, by implication, an object is completely known when this recognized community is complete; and completely unknown when there is no recognized community at all. Manifestly, then, the smallest conceivable degree of knowledge implies at least two things between which some community is recognized. But, if so, how can we know the substance of mind? To know the substance of mind is to be conscious of some community between it and some other substance. If, with the idealist, we say that there exists no other substance, then, necessarily, as there is nothing with which the substance of mind can be even compared, much less assimilated, it remains unknown; while, if we hold with the realist that being is fundamentally divisible into that which is present to us as mind, and that which, lying outside of it, is not mind, then, as this proposition itself asserts a difference and not a likeness, it is equally clear that mind remains unclassable and therefore unknowable.

The answer to this supposed insuperable dilemma may be made by determining what we mean when we speak of knowing a thing. Definition of knowing is here essential, and the first inquiry we have to make is whether, in order to know mind, it is necessary to find and recognize some community between the substance of mind and some other substance? The statement is, on the one hand, that there exists no other substance with which the substance of mind can be compared, much less assimilated, and therefore there is no aid to be derived from resemblance; or, on the other hand, that, if being is fundamentally divisible into something which is mind and something which is not mind, we depend for a knowledge of mind on a difference, and not on a likeness, and we have no means of knowing that difference. Upon either proposition, mind remains unclassable and therefore unknowable.

It may be conceded that our knowledge of the properties and forms of matter consists in recognizing a community or a difference between things which belong to the same class, so that there is a comparison between things which are of the same substance. But what is to prevent us from classifying the substance of mind, when the fundamental idea of its substance is that it is something which resembles no other substance, but constitutes a class or description of being that stands entirely by itself, and in which, for a knowledge of its properties we distinguish its properties from those of any other substance? The only difficulty that arises here springs from the fact that we have but one word—substance—by which to speak of the two existences that we call mind and matter; just as we can only speak of an organism when we speak of the natural body and the spiritual body. But this use of the same term to express things which in our consciousness stand fundamentally opposed to each other does not prevent us from discriminating between the means by which we become conscious of the two things, or from classifying the knowledge which we have of mind as something distinct from the knowledge which we have of matter.

We must discriminate between the means by which the properties of matter become known to us and the means by which the properties of mind become known to us. In both cases there is knowledge, but it is knowledge of a different kind; it is obtained by different means; and we must therefore recognize a fundamental difference between the substance of mind and the substance of matter. It is true that our knowledge of the properties of matter and our knowledge of the properties of mind are alike in this, that in both cases it is knowledge by one and the same person; but the distinction is that, in the one case, I have knowledge of objects external to myself, and, in the other case, I have knowledge of myself as the person possessing knowledge of external objects. The knowledge that we have of ourselves is what most persons mean by consciousness, and it is what we should scientifically understand by that term, although consciousness is often used as synonymous with mental cognition of things external to ourselves, and as cognition of ourselves also.

I shall now quote from the chapter in which Mr. Spencer makes a special synthesis of reason, and in which he denies the existence of the commonly assumed hiatus between reason and instinct, maintaining that the former is the continuation of the latter, because, as he thinks, the highest forms of psychical activity arise little by little out of the lowest and can not be separated from them. The passage which I shall now analyze is this:

"Here seems to be the fittest place for pointing out how the general doctrine that has been developed supplies a reconciliation between the experience-hypothesis as commonly interpreted and the hypothesis which the transcendentalists oppose to it.

"The universal law, that, other things equal, the cohesion of psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with which they have followed one another in experience, supplies an explanation of the so-called 'forms of thought,' as soon as it is supplemented by the law that habitual psychical successions entail some hereditary tendency to such successions, which, under persistent conditions, will become cumulative in generation after generation. We saw that the establishment of those compound reflex actions called instincts is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organized into correspondence with outer relations. We have now to observe that the establishment of those consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas of space and time, is comprehensible on the same principle.

"For, if, even to external relations that are often experienced during the life of a single organism, answering internal relations are established that become next to automatic—if such a combination of psychical changes as that which guides a savage in hitting a bird with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so organized as to be performed almost without thought of the processes of adjustment gone through—and if skill of this kind is so far transmissible that particular races of men become characterized by particular aptitudes, which are nothing else than partially organized psychical connections; then, if there exist certain external relations which are experienced by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives—relations which are absolutely constant, absolutely universal—there will be established answering internal relations that are absolutely constant, absolutely universal. Such relations we have in those of space and time. The organization of subjective relations adjusted to these objective relations has been cumulative, not in each race of creatures only, but throughout successive races of creatures; and such subjective relations have, therefore, become more consolidated than all others. Being experienced in every perception and every action of each creature, these connections among outer existences must, for this reason, too, be responded to by connections among inner feelings that are, above all others, indissoluble. As the substrata of all other relations in the non-ego, they must be responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of all other relations in the ego. Being the constant and infinitely repeated elements of thought, they must become the automatic elements of thought—the elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid of—the 'forms of intuition.'

"Such, it seems to me, is the only possible reconciliation between the experience-hypothesis and the hypothesis of the transcendentalists, neither of which is tenable by itself. Insurmountable difficulties are presented by the Kantian doctrine (as we shall hereafter see); and the antagonist doctrine, taken alone, presents difficulties that are equally insurmountable. To rest with the unqualified assertion that, antecedent to experience, the mind is a blank, is to ignore the questions: Whence comes the power of organizing experiences? Whence arise the different degrees of that power possessed by different races of organisms, and different individuals of the same race? If, at birth, there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, why is not a horse as educable as a man? Should it be said that language makes the difference, then why do not the cat and the dog, reared in the same household, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence? Understood in its current form, the experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of a definitely organized nervous system is a circumstance of no moment—a fact not needing to be taken into account! Yet it is the all-important fact—the fact to which, in one sense, the criticisms of Leibnitz and others pointed—the fact without which an assimilation of experiences is inexplicable.

"Throughout the animal kingdom in general the actions are dependent on the nervous structure. The physiologist shows us that each reflex movement implies the agency of certain nerves and ganglia; that a development of complicated instincts is accompanied by complication of the nervous centers and their commissural connections; that the same creature in different stages, as larva and imago, for example, changes its instincts as its nervous structure changes; and that, as we advance to creatures of high intelligence, a vast increase in the size and in the complexity of the nervous system takes place. What is the obvious inference? It is that the ability to co-ordinate impressions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies the pre-existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What is the meaning of the human brain? It is that the many established relations among its parts stand for so many established relations among the psychical changes. Each of the constant connections among the fibers of the cerebral masses answers to some constant connection of phenomena in the experiences of the race. Just as the organized arrangement subsisting between the sensory nerves of the nostrils and the motor nerves of the respiratory muscles not only makes possible a sneeze, but also, in the newly born infant, implies sneezings to be hereafter performed, so, all the organized arrangements subsisting among the nerves of the infant's brain not only make possible certain combinations of impressions, but also imply that such combinations will hereafter be made, imply that there are answering combinations in the outer world, imply a preparedness to cognize these combinations, imply faculties of comprehending them. It is true that the resulting compound psychical changes do not take place with the same readiness and automatic precision as the simple reflex action instanced; it is true that some individual experiences seem required to establish them. But, while this is partly due to the fact that these combinations are highly involved, extremely varied in their modes of occurrence, made up, therefore, of psychical relations less completely coherent, and hence need further repetitions to perfect them, it is in a much greater degree due to the fact that at birth the organization of the brain is incomplete, and does not cease its spontaneous progress for twenty or thirty years afterward. Those who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form. Were the infant born with a full-sized and completely constructed brain, their position would be less untenable. But, as the case stands, the gradually increasing intelligence displayed throughout childhood and youth is more attributable to the completion of the cerebral organization than to the individual experiences—a truth proved by the fact that in adult life there is sometimes displayed a high endowment of some faculty which, during education, was never brought into play. Doubtless, experiences received by the individual furnish the concrete materials for all thought. Doubtless, the organized and semi-organized arrangements existing among the cerebral nerves can give no knowledge until there has been a presentation of the external relations to which they correspond. And, doubtless, the child's daily observations and reasonings aid the formation of those involved nervous connections that are in process of spontaneous evolution, just as its daily gambols aid the development of its limbs. But saying this is quite a different thing from saying that its intelligence is wholly produced by its experiences. That is an utterly inadmissible doctrine—a doctrine which makes the presence of a brain meaningless—a doctrine which makes idiocy unaccountable.

"In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment, there is truth in the doctrine of 'forms of intuition'—not the truth which its defenders suppose, but a parallel truth. Corresponding to absolute external relations, there are established in the structure of the nervous system absolute internal relations—relations that are potentially present before birth in the shape of definite nervous connections, that are antecedent to, and independent of, individual experiences, and that are automatically disclosed along with the first cognitions. And, as here understood, it is not only these fundamental relations which are thus predetermined, but also hosts of other relations of a more or less constant kind, which are congenitally represented by more or less complete nervous connections. But these predetermined internal relations, though independent of the experiences of the individual, are not independent of experiences in general: they have been determined by the experiences of preceding organisms. The corollary here drawn from the general argument is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of life, or, rather, during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been successively bequeathed, principal and interest; and have slowly amounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant—which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further complicates, and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future generations; and thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thus it happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakespeares."[150]

The learned philosopher has here dealt with two hypotheses, neither of which he considers tenable by itself. The first is that the individual mind, anterior to experience, is a blank; that at birth there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, which become organized into intelligence by experience. The other hypothesis is that of the transcendental school, which attributes the growth of intelligence wholly to implanted intuitions, which become expanded by the increase of mental power. His argument is put thus: If at birth the mind of the individual is a blank, and it becomes capable of thought or possessed of intelligence by experience, beginning with a passive receptivity of impressions, and going on to their organization into intelligence by the repetition of experiences and their increasing complexity—why, he asks, is not a horse as educable as a man? Why do not the cat and the dog, reared in the same household and hearing human beings use language every moment of their lives, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence? In the first place, as a matter of fact, many animals are educable beyond their natural capacity of intelligence, or beyond the point at which they would arrive without such education, to a very remarkable degree. I have heard a credible description of a dog which would ascend to a chamber and bring down an article that he had been told to bring. Many repetitions of the command and the performance had taught the animal to associate the name of the article which he was to bring down with the act which he was to perform. While I am writing, a bear beneath my window is going through performances, at the word of command, of very considerable varieties; actions which he would not do if he had not been trained to do them. The trained war-horse knows the meaning of the different airs played on the bugle upon the battle-field or the parade-ground, and instantly charges or wheels about, without waiting to be prompted by the bit or the spur. Insects can be trained, to some extent, in the same way; birds to a much greater extent. Is the explanation of these capacities to be found in a definitely organized nervous system as the all-important fact without which an assimilation of experiences is inexplicable? Grant that, as we advance from creatures of very low to creatures of very high intelligence, we find a vast increase in the size and complexity of the nervous system taking place through the series, until we arrive at its highest and most complex development in man. What is the hypothesis which explains the difference in mental power between man and all the other creatures below him in the capability of co-ordinating impressions and performing the appropriate actions? It is, according to Mr. Spencer, that the capability implies the existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way; that where this arrangement does not exist the capability is not found; and where it exists in only a low degree the capability exists only in the same degree. As two parallel and concurring facts these may be conceded. But why are not these facts entirely consistent with another hypothesis, namely, that to each creature, along with its specially organized nervous system, there has been given by divine appointment a certain degree of innate mental power, to explain which we must follow the impressions produced in the nervous system into their transmutation into intelligence, until we arrive at the limit of that intelligence? Mr. Spencer's answer to this inquiry is twofold: first, that the experience-hypothesis, in the case of the individual creature, or the constant repetition of the impressions and the appropriate actions, is insufficient to account for what takes place, without recognizing the fact that the actions are dependent on the nervous structure, without which the impressions would not be followed by the actions; second, that the nervous structure in the different races of animals has come to be what it is in each race by gradual modifications and increments through the process of evolution of organisms out of one another, and that these accumulations have resulted in the human brain, which has the highest power of co-ordinating the impressions and performing the appropriate actions. Then he puts, with an air of final solution, the question, "What is the human brain?" which he answers in his own way.

His mode of answering this question is that the brain is an organ with established relations among its parts, which stand for so many established relations among the psychical changes. I understand this to mean, that as the human brain, in the process of animal evolution, has come to have certain constant connections among the fibers of the cerebral masses, each of these connections answers to some constant connection of phenomena in the experiences of the race. His corollary is that the human brain is an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received by the race during the evolution of life, or during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. Each infant of the human race, to whom has descended this improved and perfect brain, has latent in that organ a high capacity for intelligence. This it begins to exercise and strengthen and further complicate as life goes on, and at the end of twenty or thirty years the individual brain is fully developed, and this development, or capacity for development, the individual bequeaths with minute additions, principal and interest, to future generations. In different races of men the cubic bulk of the brain varies greatly, according to the size transmitted from ancestors; and so certain faculties which scarcely exist in some races become congenital in others; and whereas the remote ancestors of all of us were savages, incapable even of conceiving of numbers, and possessing but the rudest elements of language, there have at length arisen our Newtons and Shakespeares.

This hypothesis leads me to ask a question and to state a fact. The question is, What is it in the infant of the most developed and cultivated race that constitutes the high intelligence which is said to lie latent in his brain? In other words, is there nothing in that infant, or in the adult which he becomes, but a brain and a nervous system of a highly organized and complex physical structure adapted to receive impressions on itself from without? Are the experiences which have been enjoyed by the progenitors of the human infant or by preceding organisms registered in his brain, and is his capacity of intelligence dependent on his having inherited the same or nearly the same volume of brain as that which was possessed by his progenitors? And does the intelligence consist, in degree or in kind, in nothing but a repetition of the same experiences as those through which his progenitors were carried, or is there a something in him to which his individual experiences contribute the mental food by which the mind is nourished and by the assimilation of which its individual intellectual growth becomes possible?

It is not necessary to question the fact that individuals of great intellect, the Newtons and the Shakespeares, have had or may have had large brains; or the fact that, as between races of men, the most intelligent have brains of greater cubic measure than the less intelligent. But it has not always been found that individuals of superior intellect have had comparatively larger brains than other individuals, nor that those who have had very large brains have transmitted them to their children. The important fact to which I meant to advert is that, since we have known much about the human brain and the nervous system connected with it, it has not been found that, in its several parts and in the action of the nerves connected with it, it has been differently organized and acted upon in the lowest savages from what we know of it in the European and the most civilized races. There is a difference in volume, but not in the organization or the office of the brain in different races of men, as there is in different individuals of the same race. The fact that all men, since they became a completed type of animal, however they originated and became men, have possessed a capacity to become in different degrees intelligent and thinking beings, points strongly to the conclusion that while in each individual there is a nervous system so organized as to transmit impressions from external objects to the central physical organ called the brain, there must be another existence in that individual, of a spiritual and intellectual nature, of a substance that is not physical, to which the brain supplies the materials of thought, thought being mental cognition of an idea. If I am asked for the proof of such an existence, I answer that the proof is consciousness, as I define it, and this I conceive is the highest kind of proof.

One may appeal to the convictions of mankind for an answer to the question, What is the highest and most satisfactory kind of knowledge that any of us possess? The most intelligent man may be mistaken in that part of self-knowledge that relates to his own character or motives. Others may see him very differently from the light in which he sees himself, and they may be right and he may be wrong. He may think, too, that he knows a great deal that he does not know; but no intelligent man is mistaken or in any way deluded when he believes in his own existence. No man in his waking moments and in his right mind ever confounded his own identity, as we have seen that Lady Macbeth did when she was walking in her sleep, with the identity of another person. No man in his right mind loses the constant, ever-present sense of himself as a being and as one distinct from all other beings. The reason is that his own existence is certified to him by the most unerring of witnesses, one who can not lie, because the fact of one's own existence is the fact of which that witness must speak. Of all other facts the witness may speak falsely. The mind can not speak falsely when it speaks to us of our own existence, for the witness who speaks and the person spoken to are one and the same. The falsehood, if there could be a falsehood, would be instantly detected.

As the mind certifies to itself its own existence by the most direct and the highest kind of proof, so it certifies to itself the powers with which it is endowed; and this brings me to the anatomical examination of the structure of the mind. I shall not make this analysis a very minute one, but shall confine it to those distinct elementary powers which are constituted by systems, as the powers of the bodily organism are constituted by systems distinguishable by the functions which they perform. In the bodily organism we recognize the digestive system, the system of circulation of the blood, the muscular system, the nervous system, the sensory system, which is distributed into the different organs of sense, the male and female systems of sexual generation, and the female system of gestation. These several systems, acting together as one complex mechanism endowed with the mysterious principle of life, form in each human being of either sex the physical existence of the individual. Acting in each individual of either sex simultaneously and with mutual involved interdependencies, they form a whole which, in its several parts and their functions, may be likened to the several parts and functions in one of those machines which we ourselves construct—with this difference, however, that in one life is present and in the other it is not. The fundamental question is whether this complex animal mechanism, thus constituted of certain physical systems, also constitutes during this life the entire individual. If so, the individual existence is a unit, and, when the physical organism perishes by what we call death, the individual existence ceases. If, on the contrary, we have satisfactory proof that there is, during this life, in each individual an organized and extended entity, composed, like the systems of the bodily organisms, of certain systems of its own but of a substance that is not material, then the existence of each individual is a dual existence; and one of the two existences now associated and acting together may be dissolved into its original material elements, while the other, composed of a different substance, may be indissoluble and have an endless life. There is no middle ground that I can perceive between these two hypotheses. One or the other of them is absolutely true, independent of the inquiry as to the mode in which mind came to exist; for after going through with all the reasoning and all the proofs that are supposed to show its origin by the process called evolution, we must still come back to the question of what mind is after it has come into existence; must determine on which side lies the preponderating probability of its continuance after the death of the body; and must accept the conclusion of its destruction or cessation when the body dies, or the other conclusion that it is unlike the body in its substance, and therefore indestructible by the means which destroy the body. For this reason we must examine the mind for proof that it is an organism of a special nature because composed of a special substance, and this proof is to be reached by an analysis of the systems of which the mind is composed. I select, of course, for the purposes of this analysis, any individual whose physical and mental faculties have had the average development into the condition that is called a sound mind in a sound body—mens sana in corpore sano. I shall treat incidentally of the condition of idiocy.

We may classify the distinct systems of the mind, with their several functions, as easily as we can classify the distinct systems of our physical structure and their functions. I have seen the systems of the mind distributed into five; and although I do not adopt the whole analysis made by the writer to whom I refer, or make use of the same terminology, I shall follow his classification because it is one which any thinking person must recognize as a description of mental powers of which he is conscious.[151] We are all aware that we possess the following mental systems in which inhere certain elementary powers that are mental powers:

1. A sensory system, by which the mind takes impressions from matter.

2. A system of intellectual faculties, such as reason, imagination, reflection, combination of ideas, discrimination between different ideas.

3. A system of emotions, or susceptibilities to pleasure or pain, of a moral and intellectual nature as distinguished from the pleasurable or painful excitation of our nerves.

4. A system of desires, which prompt us to wish for and acquire some good, or to avoid some evil.

5. A system of affections, which prompt us to like or dislike persons, things, situations, and whatever is attractive or unattractive, as the case may be.

A little further analysis of each of these systems will explain why they are respectively to be thus classified as distinguishable organic powers or functions of the human mind:

First. The mind is placed as a recipient in correspondence with the material universe through the nerves of sensation and the special corporeal organs, whereby the properties of matter become to some extent known to us. As the power of the physical senses to obtain for us a knowledge of the properties of matter is limited, even when our senses are in the utmost state of their normal capacity, there may be properties of matter which will never become known to us in our present existence. But certain of its properties do become known to us, and we are perfectly aware that this takes place through our physical organs of sense, which convey to our mental reception certain impressions. This power of the mind, therefore, to receive such impressions, to retain and transmute them into thought, is to be recognized as a power exerted by means of an organic physical contrivance and an organic mental structure, the two acting together, the resultant being the mind's faculty for receiving ideas from the external world. Let us suppose, then, that the bodily senses are impaired by the partial destruction of their organs. It does not follow that the knowledge which has been derived from them, when they were in full activity, is destroyed; all that happens is that we acquire no more of such knowledge by the same means, or do not acquire it so readily and completely. If the destruction of the physical senses is so complete as it becomes when death of the whole body takes place, the materials derived from the impressions conveyed to the mind from external objects during life have been transmuted into ideas and thoughts, and, as that which holds the ideas and the thoughts is of a substance unlike in nature to the substance of the physical organs which conveyed the impressions, the rational conclusion is that the ideas and thoughts will continue to be held by it, after the dissolution of the body, as they were held while the body was in full life.

Second. I recognize in the mind a system of intellectual faculties. Of intellect, I should say that the ascertainment of truth is its primary function; and hence I should say that the power of retaining permanent possession of truth already ascertained is the means by which we maintain continued ascertainment, or the utilization of truth already ascertained.[152] For the exercise of this power of ascertaining, holding, applying, and expressing truth—the processes of intellect—we have three recognized faculties. These are the intuitive faculty; the faculty of association or combination; and the introspective faculty, or the capacity to look inward upon the processes of our own minds. The philosophers who maintain that all our knowledge is derived from experience admit neither the intuitive faculty nor the fact of intuition. On the other hand, the philosophers who maintain, as Mr. Spencer does, that the brain of every infant is an organized register of the experiences of his ancestors, do not allow of the existence of any intuitions as facts in the individual life of the infant, because they regard the individual experiences of the infant as mere repetitions of former experiences that took place in its progenitors. But rightly regarded the true meaning of the intuitive faculty is this: that at the instant when a new sensory impression is received by the infant, or the adult, there is an innate and implanted power which comes into play, by which is asserted the reality of that from which the sensory impression is received. This power, the intuitive faculty, is infallible. It was ordained as the means by which a sensory impression becomes to us a reality. We are so constructed, mentally, that we must believe those primary facts which the sensory impressions certify to us to be facts. On the veracity of this certification we are absolutely dependent, because we can not contradict the affirmations of reality which causation makes to our intuitive mental perceptions. On this veracity we risk our lives; we could not be safe if we were not subjected to this belief. Intuition, therefore, is something anterior to experience; it is that power by which the first experience and the last become to us the means of belief in a reality. This is a power that can belong to and inhere in a spiritual organism alone. We must, therefore, recognize in the infant this original implanted endowment, the capacity to be mentally convinced of realities; and while, in order to meet the first exercise of this capacity there must be a physical organism which will conduct the sensory impressions to the brain and a brain that will receive them, the capacity of the infant to have its first conviction of the reality certified to it by the sensory impression is at once the capacity of an intellectual being, and a necessity imposed upon him by the law of his existence. Idiocy, when complete, is the absence of this capacity, by reason of some failure of connection between the brain, as the central recipient of sensory impressions, and the mind which should receive and transmute those impressions into thought. We are scarcely warranted in regarding the idiot as a human animal possessed of no mind whatever. The absolute idiot should be defined as a human creature whom we can not educate at all—in whom we can awaken no intelligence; but we are not therefore authorized in believing that there is no provision whatever for the development of intelligence after the mere physical life of the body is ended. Absolute idiocy, or what, from our as yet imperfect means of developing intelligence in such unfortunate persons we must regard as at present absolute, is probably very rare. Between human creatures so born and those vast multitudes in whom average intelligence is developed by surrounding influences, whatever they may be, there are various degrees of the capacity for development; and what happens in these intermediate cases proves that there are different degrees in which the connection between the physical and the mental organism is established at birth, so that in some the connection may be said to be abnormal and imperfect, while in the enormous majority it is at least so nearly normal and complete that intelligence may be developed.

Here, then, is the place to advert to Mr. Spencer's assertion that the doctrine that intelligence in the human being is wholly produced by experience is utterly inadmissible; that it makes the presence of a brain meaningless, and idiocy unaccountable. A doctrine which imputes the development of intelligence wholly to the experience of the individual is of course untenable. There must be a brain and a nervous system; but we are not warranted, in the case of the idiot, in assuming that he has a differently organized brain and nervous system from those of his parents or others of the human race, as Mr. Spencer appears to me to assume. What we are warranted in believing is that while the brain and nervous system of the idiot child may be just as complete in his structure as in those of the parents, there has somehow occurred, from some cause, antecedent in some cases to birth, but operating after birth in other cases, a failure of the adequate connection between the brain and the mind, so that intelligence can not be developed at all, or can be developed but partially. The individual may have inherited just as good an "organized register" of the experience of his ancestors—just as good a natural brain as his brothers and sisters who are perhaps highly intelligent from their birth, or capable of becoming intelligent. Yet he lacks the ability to co-ordinate impressions and to perform the actions appropriate to those impressions, because there has failed to be established in him the necessary connection between the impressions and the sensory intellectual system which constitutes one organic part of the mind. The experiences, however often repeated, of the impressions produced by his physical senses on his brain, remain there as corporeal feelings. They reach no further. They do not become transmuted into ideas, and so intelligence can not be developed, or is developed but to a very feeble extent. Instead of saying that "the gradually increasing intelligence displayed throughout childhood is more attributable to the completion of the cerebral organization than to the individual experiences," I should say that it is most attributable to the presence of an established connection between the function of the cerebral organization and the mental receptivity of impressions, which is not merely passive, but is incessantly active because incessantly receiving, and that, where this connection is wanting, the receptivity, although it may exist, can not become active, and so intelligence can not be developed in this life. But there may be another state of existence, in which the mind of the idiot, no longer dependent on a physical organization of brain and nervous system for the reception of ideas and for intellectual growth, but retaining its capacity for mental development, may begin and carry on such development by other means; whereas, if the brain and the nervous system constitute all there is of any human being, whether born an idiot or born capable of intellectual growth through his individual experiences, he can have no future after that brain and nervous system are destroyed, unless we suppose that mind is something that has been developed out of matter into a spiritual existence—a supposition which is to me inconceivable.

The second of the intellectual faculties is the associative, or that intuitive power by which ideas are combined and associated or held in disjunction and separation. I regard this as an intuitive faculty, because, as our observation teaches us, its presence and power, manifested at the first dawning of infantile intelligence, are attested by every exercise of the organs through which the external world reaches our minds, to the last moment of our mortal existence. Experience is, of course, necessary to the first action of this intuitive faculty. This is only another way of saying that there must occur a sensory impression upon the brain which becomes transmuted into the idea of the external object, and then a repetition of that impression produces a repetition of the idea, and the associative faculty combines or disjoins them. But unless there exists an intuitive power, inherent in the intellective system, whereby the first idea and the second can be associated and compared, there can be no knowledge, no acquisition of truth, because the sensory impressions will stop in the brain as so many feelings excited through the nervous system, instead of being transmuted into thought.

The introspective faculty, on the other hand, does not deal solely with sensory impressions, or with the ideas which they have suggested. It is that power of the mind by which it can look inward upon itself. This is seemingly a paradox; but nevertheless, the existence of such a faculty is a necessary hypothesis, not only because we are conscious of it, but because without it we could have no means of analyzing our own mental structure, although we could make some very partial analysis of the mind of another individual by studying his actions. As regards ourselves, it is as if our visual organs possessed the power of looking at the process by which an image of an external object is impressed upon the retina and is thence transmitted to the brain, where the sensory impression is produced. This, of course, is a physical impossibility. All we can do is to examine the physical structure of the eye, with its wonderful provision of lenses and other means for the reception and the effect of light, and to reason upon what we can discover that the process of what is called seeing must be thus or thus. But that process itself we can not see by the same organs by which it is carried on. In the case of the mind, however—and herein is one of the remarkable proofs of its unlikeness as an organism to the bodily organism—there is a power to witness, to observe, to be sensible of its own operations. This power, like all the other mental powers, may be very feeble in some individuals, for want of exercise, but in others, from long and frequent exercise, it may become exceedingly vigorous, and be the means of advancing mental philosophy if its observations are preserved and recorded. It is one of the systems which, as a whole, constitute the spiritual organism to which we give the name of mind. Such a capacity can not be predicated of a physical organism. It is impossible for us to conceive of a machine standing and looking upon its own operations, speculating upon their improvement, or thinking of the relation of its mechanism to the human author of its being. It is equally impossible for us to think of the body of man contemplating its own existence, or being sensible of it; but it is perfectly easy to conceive of its being known to the mind that inhabits it, which takes cognizance both of its own operations and of the operations of the physical organism, reflects upon them separately or in their action upon one another, and spontaneously refers both to an author.

Third. I have placed third in the category of mental systems the system of emotions or susceptibilities to mental pleasure or pain, as distinguished from the pleasurable or painful excitation of our nervous system. No one can doubt that, however powerful may be the influence upon our mental states of physical pain or physical sensations that are pleasurable, there is such a thing as mental pain and mental pleasure, satisfaction or dissatisfaction, wholly unconnected with and in no way dependent upon our corporeal feelings, present or past. It is from this susceptibility to mental pain or pleasure that we come to have the idea of goodness or badness, which is originally a classification of the qualities of external things as good or bad; the good being those which affect us pleasurably, and the bad those which affect us painfully. By our mental organization we are placed in such correspondence with the material universe, that things apart from ourselves affect us agreeably or disagreeably; sights, sounds, odors, and tastes give us pleasure or pain. We are also placed in correspondence with the spiritual universe, and thereby certain acts, relations, and traits of character give us pleasure, or the reverse. In process of time, the youth whose mental systems are in the course of expansion comes to perceive that his own acts give him pleasure or pain, and hence he derives the perception of good or bad qualities in himself. Moral goodness in ourselves—goodness of disposition, of intention, of volition, of habit—is found to be distinct from physical and intellectual goodness; and thus the consciousness of moral goodness becomes the intellectual faculty to which moral commands can be addressed, with a prospect that the connection between obedience and happiness will be perceived. This susceptibility to mental pain or pleasure, from the qualities of external things, from the acts and dispositions of other persons, and from our own, is one that can inhere in a mental organization, but it can not possibly inhere in a physical organism. The physical organism is undoubtedly the means by which the mental susceptibility to pleasure or pain is reached from the external universe; but, unless there is a mental organism to feel the pleasure or the pain, the action of the physical organization is nothing but the excitation of the nervous system. I, therefore, make a distinct class among the mental systems, and assign to it the faculty of experiencing mental pleasure or mental pain as a capacity distinct from the pleasurable or painful excitation of our nerves.

Fourth. In the category of mental systems may be placed those desires which lead us to wish for and strive to obtain some good or to avoid some evil. This, surely, is not to be regarded as anything but an intellectual perception of what is to us a good or an evil. It is a structural capacity of the soul which, after an experience of that which we learn to be good for us, or the reverse of good, is always prompting us to take the steps or to perform the acts which will insure a repetition of that experience, in the acquisition of further good or the avoidance of further evil. Its operations may be perverted. We may, from bad habits or erroneous ideas of good and evil, pursue objects that are pernicious. But whether we strive for that which is truly good, or is deceptively regarded as a good, we are perpetually acting under the impulse of a desire that is implanted in us, and that operates as a desire whether its objects are worthy or unworthy, beneficial or injurious, noxious or innoxious to our moral health.

Fifth, and lastly, we may classify the affections as one of the structural systems of our spiritual existence. It is that part of our natures that makes us like or dislike both persons and things; and, in regard to the former, it is the capacity for love in its high distinction from the physical appetite of sexual passion. The range of its operation is most various and multiform, but throughout all of its operations it is a spiritual capacity, implanted in us for our happiness as spiritual beings.

If it is objected that this is an arbitrary classification—that as an analysis of structural systems in our mental organization it bears no analogy to the anatomical exploration and classification of the structural systems of our physical organism—the answer is, that in regard to the latter we make the examination by the exercise of our corporeal senses, chiefly by the visual organs, as we do in the case of all other organized matter. In analyzing the structural organization of our minds, we are examining a subject that is not laid bare to the inspection of any of our corporeal organs; the scalpel in the hand of the dissector can afford us no aid in this investigation, but the inspection must be carried on by turning the eye of the mind inward upon itself. This we are mentally constituted to do. While, therefore, it may be true that the classification which I have made, or which may have been made by others, of the structural mental systems, is in one sense arbitrary, and while in any method of describing them they may run into or overlap one another in a complex organism, it will always remain true that the mind is capable of such examinations, and that the analysis, however given, is useful to the comprehension of the mind as an organized and extended entity. No one can carry on this mental examination without perceiving that he is examining a something which has an independent existence and a life of its own, whether he supposes it to have been evolved out of organized matter, or embraces the idea of its distinct and special creation by an exercise of the Divine Will.

The two main hypotheses concerning the origin of mind may now be contrasted. In the long process of development of animal organisms out of one another there come to be, it is said, higher and higher degrees of intelligence, as the nervous system becomes more and more capable of complex impressions, until we arrive at the consummate physical organization and the supreme intelligence of the human race. The physical organization is open to our examination, and we find the human brain divided into cerebral masses, with ganglia of sensory nerves extending to the external sensory organs. Intelligence is the faculty of comprehending by previous preparation the combinations of impressions made on the brain through the sensory nerves. The brain being an organized register in which the experiences of progenitors have accumulated a high degree of this faculty, each human infant born into the world comes into it with a prepared capacity to acquire the combinations of impressions produced in his individual experience. Transmitted from generation to generation, this inherited capacity becomes the means by which each individual manifests and enjoys what we call intelligence; and the resulting aggregate of all the faculties thus called into exercise is what we denominate mind. It must be observed, however, that this theory or explanation of the origin of mind, rejecting the hypothesis of its special creation as a being of a spiritual nature, assumes it to be a something which has been developed out of the growth and improvement of a physical organism. When you inquire whether the nature of this something is supposed to be a product of a different substance from matter, although developed out of matter, you are left without an answer; and when you press the inquiry whether a spiritual existence can be conceived as having grown out of the action of a physical organism, you are told that there are no means of determining what a spiritual existence is, because there is nothing with which you can compare it so as to ascertain what it resembles or what it does not resemble. Or if there are some who accept the evolution theory of the origin of mind, and who think it possible that a spiritual existence can owe its origin to the action of matter without any intervention of a creating power purposely giving existence to a spiritual essence, you have to ask a question to which you can only get this answer: that it has pleased the Almighty Being to establish a system by which a spiritual in contradistinction to a physical existence has been developed in countless ages out of the action of material substances organized into definite systems and endowed with the principle of life. Those who assume this hypothesis must necessarily assume also that the spiritual existence is, after it has come into being, an existence distinct from the physical organism, although generated out of it, and then they must encounter the further inquiry as to the probability of the supposed method of production resorted to by the Supreme Being.