A, 541. Davies, Rev. J. Llewelyn-Con- Emigrant, 561. English Dictionary, An, 393. Ernest Jones, A Retrospect, 357. Faithfull, Miss Emily-Contempo- Garnett, Richard, 603. Genius of Parable, The, 227, 293. Haweis, M. E., 26. His End was Peace, 356. History, Science, and Dogma, 188. Ideals of Human Excellence, Illumination and the Electric Indian Hill Tribes, Some, 143. Knight of Innishowen," "The, 226. Law, Under The, 460. Leighton, Sir Frederick, P.R.A.- Machiavelli, Life as seen by, 182. and Roman Knight's Love, The, 58. Sheehan, John, 200. Sonnet, a Difficult, 672. Soul, The, and The Theory of Spirit of the Universities:- Cambridge, 108, 245, 365, Dublin, 108, 368, 500, 753. THE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE. JANUARY, 1879. THE SOUL, AND THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. I WHO sit down to write this paper, and the reader who takes it up to peruse it, are both living, active, thinking beings. We know what we mean by the assertion-so long as we make it in the ordinary sense -that our limbs perform certain actions, that our senses inform of what is going on around us, and that our minds take cognisance of these events, can draw conclusions from them, and can even form abstract ideas concerning the past and the future, and concerning the relations of the various forces at work around us. So far all is clear; but when we ask how we do this, we are brought to a halt. We know that we are conscious beings; but why or how we are so we have no means of ascertaining. The materialist says that this consciousness is the result of our bodily organisation, arising out of it as a result of vibrations of the molecules of the brain; and he can indeed show that these two phenomena are always connected, so far as our experience goes. But here his evidence ceases; he cannot suggest, as Professor Tyndall has so ably pointed out, how molecular action can produce consciousness, any more than we can explain the converse of the problem, namely, by what lever consciousness can move molecules of matter. Automatic actions may indeed be accounted for by assuming them to be the results of known physical forces (always provided that the investigator admits the origin and essence of these forces to be unknown to him); but we have not yet been able to cross the gulf which separates such actions from that mental consciousness which enables its possessor to foresee, control, and bend to his use all the machinery of inorganic nature. Pure materialism, in fact, is so inadequate to account for the facts. of human life, that it has never taken any great hold upon the world. Though maintained by isolated thinkers, it has always. failed to conquer the general instincts of mankind. Man sees and feels that his own consciousness. is the fact of which he has more certainty than of any other; and, after all explanations given of the modes of expression of this con-sciousness, he still falls back upon the inquiry, "whence is this sense of personal identity, and what is. its nature and its destiny ?" The spiritualist attempts to answer this question in a different manner from the mate rialist. He takes consciousness as a fact not explained by any amount or combinations of molecular action, and therefore looks upon it as the result of a power quite as real and manifest as the forces which underlie matter; and he conceives of it as being received from the First Cause of all things by a different channel, and not through the properties of material substance. În a word, he assumes that man has a dual nature, consisting of a soul or spirit united to a bodily organism; and in the present state of our knowledge he has so far the best of the argument that by his assumption he covers the whole ground of human action, which the materialist confessedly does not. But when the spiritualist tries to account for the origin and nature of soul or spirit, he too is at fault, for he has no facts upon which to found a theory. He sees the action of consciousness and will-power during the life of an individual, but he has no clue to its existence before that being came into life, nor after it leaves it: unless indeed he admits the evidence of apparitions and similar phenomena, which, for the present at least, would not be accepted by the world at large as a basis of argument. He can therefore only postulate all possible sources of the spirit of man, and test these by what he knows of its action and expression in a living being; and, speculative as this must necessarily be, yet every advance in physiological knowledge, by defining and formulating the mechanical action of the body, makes the tests more severe, and helps us to eliminate error, though not to arrive at a positive conclusion. Three clear and distinctive doctrines of the origin of the soul have been held, not only by different religious sects, but even within the pale of the Christian Church itself. 1. That the soul is created expressly by the Deity for each new body, and is joined to it at or previous to birth. 2. That souls, or vital principles, have existed from the beginning of all things, and have passed successively through many bodily forms, being released from an organisation at its dissolution only to enter after a time into another and newly-born creature. 3. That the germ, or breath, of vital power is inherited from the parents, in like manner as the bodily germ which gives rise to the organism. The first of these theories, or creationism, has been almost universally held in Christian countries since the fourth century, and is so knit up with all existing ideas, as to blind the majority of people to the almost insuperable difficulties which lie in its path. Thus, if a soul is created expressly by the Deity for each body that is prepared for its reception, such a creation depends upon the caprice of any two human beings, male and female; and this without any regard to the expediency of such a birth. In cases where natural or social laws are violently infringed, and children are born, the fruits of ignorance or vice, to suffer life-long bodily or mental misery, we cannot escape, under the theory of soul-creation, from making God a partner in the act. Again, if souls come direct from the hand of the Deity, whatever imperfections their finite condition. might impose upon them, they must at least be pure. From whence then come the vicious tendencies, the soul maladies, the socalled original sin, which we trace through succeeding generations ? It was this difficulty of original sin which caused St. Augustine to lean towards the doctrine of Traducianism. "If souls are new," he writes to St. Jerome, "tell me in what place, in what way, and at what time they can have contracted culpability, so that you do not make either God, or some nature not created by God, the author of their sin. I acknowledge I can find no such solution, if the souls of children are so new that they are in no way the result of propagation." If, scared by this conclusion, we attempt to consider the soul as merely an animating breath, receiving all its impressions from the body, then we not only divest it of its guiding power, and virtually side with the materialist, but we are involved in this difficulty, that the soul must inevitably lose by its passage through the world, entering it pure and undefiled, leaving it soiled, disfigured, and sin-stained; and this again must be the work of the Deity, who sent it here to undergo these pains and defilements. Most thoughtful minds will pause before accepting a theory which involves such conceptions of the Deity, and will exclaim with St. Augustine: "Tell me, I conjure you, what I am to teach; teach me what I am to believe; and tell me, if souls are created specially for those that are born every day, how the souls of little children can sin . . . . and, and, if they are innocent, by what justice has the Creator entangled them in the sin of others by putting them into members previously generated?"-and they will feel the necessity of striving to find a solution of the problem which shall not open to such grave accusations. Such a theory offers itself in the Eastern doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. This creed, as Prof. Knight remarks (Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1878), appears as one of the earliest be "and beliefs of the human mind, remains the creed of millions at the present day. The Egyptians believed it, and the peoples of India believe it still. Plato taught it; and, though the early Christian Church held aloof from it, yet some of the Fathers inclined towards it, and Origen openly adopted it. Even modern philosophers have been favourably disposed towards it; and it is somewhat startling to find David Hume pronouncing it to be "the only system of immortality that philosophy can listen to." Indeed, absurd and degrading as the doctrine of metempsychosis appears at first sight to those accustomed to view the soul as a direct emanation from the Deity, it yet grows upon the mind more and more as its scheme is unfolded; and during its long development among Eastern nations it has adapted itself to explain all the many anomalies of human nature. It avoids the difficulty of making the Deity directly responsible for the entrance of souls into this world, for it supposes existences to be wandering in space, and to enter, according to their nature, into bodies fitted for them; and thus the miserably constituted child is animated by a spirit who in this way expiates the evils of a past life. It supposes, too, that this expiation may, if properly utilised, purify and improve the spirit, which would thus benefit by the passage through this life, and leave it better than when it entered it. By this explanation metempsychosis accounts, as Mr. Knight points out, for the apparent moral anomalies of the present world, by linking them with the errors on the one hand, and the virtues on the other, of a past existence; nor is the justice of such retribution or reward really impaired by the fact that the spirit is supposed to have lost all consciousness of its former sin, because we see that this happens even in our present existence-we often suffer in age for the faults or mistakes of childhood long since forgotten. Lastly, this doctrine also disposes of a difficulty felt very strongly by many people, of the constant increase of individual existences within the universe. This increase forms a necessary part of the doctrines of creationism or Traducianism, if the individual soul is assumed to be immortal; whereas metempsychosis, starting with a certain number of souls, supposes them to undergo endless transmutations, while the amount of spiritual existence remains a fixed and constant quantity. Thus far metempsychosis appears to harmonise well with the facts and theories of modern science. But when we begin to test it by the wonderful facts of inheritance which have lately been so fully investigated by the light of the theory of evolution, then the weakness of this doctrine becomes apparent. care So long as all the different species of living beings were supposed to be separate creations, formed according to rigid and fixed types, but little attention was paid to the small variations in physical structure inherited from parent to child, and still less to those mental and physical qualities which are common to man and the lower animals. It was natural, therefore, that a resemblance to a remote ancestor, or an unusual development of animal propensities in a human being, should suggest to primitive minds the reappearance of the spirit of a departed hero, or of an animal spirit in cases where the ferocity of the tiger or the physical courage of the lion seem to exhibit themselves. Such resemblances, however, together with others far more subtle to be traced in the fiercer passions of human nature, find a ready and reasonable explanation without going beyond this life, when we recognise that, from a long line of animal and savage ancestry, inherited feelings survive in us totally incompatible with the present state of civilisation; and are only being slowly crushed out in the struggle for existence, just as hothouse vines, in spite of the gardener's pains to bind them up and support every new shoot without the necessity of exertion on its own part, continue to dissipate a portion of their strength in the putting forth of perfectly useless tendrils, which in the ages of wild growth were like hands necessary to cling with. Thus, if we assume that the whole of our being at birth is the result of the inheritance of the experiences of all who have gone before us, the necessity of a previous existence to account for the peculiarities and weakness of our nature ceases to exist. We have a natural explanation, and need not seek an imaginary one. The case is, however, much stronger even than this. The only way in which the metempsychosist can account for the possibility of harmonious co-operation between a body inherited from earthly parents, and a soul already possessed of definite qualities, is by supposing that the soul chooses a body in close affinity with its own nature, and therefore tends to keep up the outward semblance of inherited bias. Thus, for example, while the spirit of a thief will seek out the child of low-natured parents, the highly gifted nature will enter into a delicately and highly developed organism. But this argument tells most heavily against its advocate exactly in those cases upon which he most relies to prove his position, |