cut off a leg of the stork after it had been cooked, and put the mutilated bird upon the table of the nobleman. When dinner was served, the nobleman called the servant to the door of the feasting-hall, and said, "How does it happen that this stork has but one leg?" -"Why, sir," was the hypothesis used in answer, "a stork never has but one leg." No more was said in the presence of the company; but the next day, before the nobleman dismissed his servant, he thought he would see what further hypothesis the man would offer. So he took his servant into the grounds of the castle, and showed him the storks standing there. "See," the nobleman said, "each stork has two legs." "But look again," said the servant," each stork has really now but one;" and surely each was standing, after the manner of his bird, on one. But the nobleman shouted to the birds with a frightening gesture, "Off, away!" and each stork ran away with two legs. "Yes," said the servant, who did not lack hypotheses; "but yesterday you did not say, Off and away!' to that stork on the table." [Laughter.] There must at some point be an end to hypotheses; but materialism saves itself by saying, "Off and away!" to the baked stork. [Applause.] Why, the poor grave-digger in Hamlet knew better than that; for he was no materialist. "Who is to be buried here?" said Hamlet; and the fool answered, "One that was a woman; But, rest her soul, she is dead." At our present point of view, we need only name the propositions which flow from the latest physiological research : 6. Molecular motions in the nervous system are now definitely known to form in all cases a closed circuit. 7. They cannot, therefore, be said to be identical with mental activities. 8. They are only parallel with them. 9. They are demonstrably not transmuted into mental activities, but only correlated with them. Parallelism is not identity: the keys in motion are not the music of your organ. 10. Materialism, therefore, fails under the microscope of physiology, and it fails equally under a strict application of the law of causation. The externality of the soul to the nervous mechanism is just as well known in relation to the upper key-board or influential arcs, as the externality of your fingers to the lower key-board or the automatic arcs, is known in these experiments with the frog and the pigeon, the fish and the rabbit. You know how those motions in the lower key-board are produced. You know, therefore, how those in the upper are started. Matter did not start them there. Matter does not start them here. Mind starts them here. Mind starts them there. We are conscious in ourselves of power of choice, and that inner witness must be combined with the testimony that comes from the scalpel and the microscope, to show that the power of self-direction does not originate in matter. How the unextended substance, mind, can act upon the extended substance, matter, is a mystery; but to affirm that it does so involves no self-contradiction. What is a mystery? Something of which we know that it is, though we do not know how it is. What is a self-contradiction? An inconsistency of a proposition with its own implications. That mind moves matter, we know. How it does it, we know not. Sir William Hamilton (PROFESSOR VEITCH, Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, p. 154), in his efforts to solve this mystery, was anxious that even what is called mesmeric force should be investigated; and he and many other acute minds have asked whether. it may not be within the power of the human will to influence another human will across the street, across the city, across a continent. In the name of exact science, many seek to-day to know whether by possibility human will may not, in some cases, make matter move by willing to do it. I hold no strange theory on this theme; I am shy to my finger's tips of even the conclusions of Carpenter concerning it. But will you not allow me, in the name of Sir William Hamilton's curiosity, and in that of President Wayland of Brown University, to use, merely as illustration, this presumed power of the human will to move matter without contact through other matter? If you conceive that as possible, and fairly within natural law, then natural law itself becomes the magnetization of all matter by the influence of one Omnipresent Will, in which is no variableness nor shadow of turning. As our wills play upon the keyboard of the influential human nerves, so Omniscience and Omnipresence, magnetizing all worlds and their inhabitants, play upon all infinities and eternities. [Applause.] The connection of the Divine Will with matter may be thus obscurely revealed to us by that of the human will with matter. Each is a mystery; but, if these two are kindred mysteries, the universe is one, and man's passion for unity in science is satisfied. Matter is an effluence of the Divine Nature, and so is all finite mind, and thus the universe is one in its present ground of existence and in the First Cause. In a better age, Science, lighting her lamp at that Higher Unity, will teach that, although He, whom we dare not name, transcends all natural laws, they are, through his Immanence, literally God, who was, and is, and is to come. Science does this already for all who think clearly. [Applause.] |