Scientific Methods of the Study of Man, and Results.

The Evolutionist.—Scientists have different ways of studying man. The evolutionist first develops the form. He says that life began in protoplasm in the unrecorded ages of the past, and step by step, through mollusk, fish, saurian and mammal, has arisen by the “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest,” until the mammal by strangely fortuitous chances has become a human being. As the human body is a modified animal form, so the intellect is a modified and developed instinct, the highest and most spiritual conscientiousness being only the result of accumulated experiences of what is for the best. The highest of animals is man, with no barrier between him and them, and subject to the same fate. There is no indication of a guiding intelligence, and if he possess an immortal spirit, so does the mollusk and the fleck of protoplasm.

The Chemist.—The chemist has his method, that of analysis. He takes the vital tissues and resolves them into their elementary parts. He tells us that there is so much hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen in the muscles; so much lime and phosphorus in the bones; so much phosphorus in the nerves, and iron in the blood. He separates these elements in retort or crucible, and weighs them with nicety so that he knows to a thousandth of a grain their proportions. He has made the ultimate analysis, and these are all he can discover. Life is the result of their union; mind the burning of phosphorus in the brain, and as for spirit, it is quite unnecessary to explain the phenomena. The chemist has finished his work, and placed in the museum the results of his analysis. That body perhaps weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. In a large glass jar is the water it contained—clear, crystal water, such as flashes in the sunlight of a rainbow-arching shower, or a dewdrop sparkling on the petals of a lily. There are about eight or ten gallons of it, for the body is three-fourths water. There is a small jar of white powder representing the lime; another, still smaller, the silex; another the phosphorus. There are homeopathic vials containing a trace of sulphur, of iron, magnesia, the potash, the soda, the salts and so on until the vials, great and small, contain more or less of almost every element. Here we have what was once a human being. We have every thing that went to make him, except one, which lacking, these elements are lifeless, and of no more value than water from the brook and earth from its banks: the vital, or psychic principle. Place the contents of all the lesser jars in the greater water jar, shake, dissolve, and manipulate, dead and inert they remain, and will remain so long as thus treated. The chemist in his analysis has made no account of the subtile principle which made these elementary atoms an expression of its purpose. The living form has its origin in the remote past, and its atoms were arranged and brought into union by a vital process which thus began; which must begin in this manner and traverse the same path. Phosphorus may be essential to give activity to the brain, and a given amount of thought may correspond to a fixed amount of phosphorus burned in nerve tissue. What of that? We know that in one of these vials is all the phosphorus that existed in one human being; we may burn it all, and it will give flame, not intelligence. If intelligence comes from its burning, the process must take place in nerve cells organized for the purpose, and that structure must have been planned by superior thought.

To call the ingredients of these bottles a human being would be like calling a pile of brick, mortar and lumber a house, except the comparison fails in the house being built by outside forces, while the living being must be organized from within. No mixing of the contents of these bottles and jars can evolve life, or even the smallest speck of protoplasm.

The Anatomist.—The third scheme is that of the anatomist, who with keen-edged scalpel bends over the body after life has gone out of it, and traces the course of arteries and veins, the form and location of nerves, the attachment of muscular fibers, and in connection with the physiologist defines the functions of each separate organ. An exquisitely fashioned machine it is, wonderfully and fearfully made, growing up from an invisible germ. After anatomist and physiologist have finished, and on their dissecting table only a mass of rubbish remains, they triumphantly point to it and exclaim: “See! We have settled the question of spirit! There can be nothing beyond this organism. We have determined how every cell and fiber of it are put together, and the functions they perform. No where is there an indication of any thing superior or transcending this material form. Here is where the food is digested; here it is assimilated; here this secretion is made; here excretion of poisonous matter takes place; here in the brain, in these gray cells, thought arises. Ah! it is a wonderful complex machine.”

Indeed it is, and what has become of the power which moved it? You have a strange machine, unlike all others, for it is, according to your ideas, an engine to make steam, instead of to be moved by it; a mill to make a waterfall, instead of to be run by falling water. What is the difference between a dead man and a living one? Incomprehensibly great, and yet the dead man to the chemist, the anatomist, the biologist, is identically the same as the living. That unknown element, life, escapes the crucible, the retort, the scalpel, the microscope, and the conclusions of those who take it not into consideration are the vague conjecturing of children, who have gained but a half knowledge of the subjects that excite their attention.

Yet science proudly claims the knowledge of all things possible to know. It has searched into the foundations of the earth and ascended the starry dome of infinitude; it grasps the inconceivably small and the inconceivably great; it delves in the hard stratum of facts, and sports in the most sublime theories. It gives the laws of the dancing motes, and those which guide the movements of stellar worlds; the sullen forces of the elements and the subtile agencies which sustain living beings.

What is Beyond the Strife for Existence?—What, O Science, is there beyond the grave which shuts down with adamantine wall between this life and the future?

The answer comes: Beyond? There is nothing. Do not dream, but know the reality. What becomes of its music after the instrument is destroyed? Where is the hum of the bee after the insect has passed on its busy wings? Where is the light in the lamp after the oil is burned? Where is the heat of the grate after the coal has burned? Given the conditions and you have music, heat and light. When these conditions perish you have nothing. As the impinging of oxygen against carbon in the flame produces light and heat, so the combination of elements in the nerves and brain produces the phenomena of life and intelligence. As the liver secretes bile, so the brain produces thought. Destroy the brain and mind disappears, as the music when the instrument is broken.

Look you and see the strife for existence. See you the myriads of human beings who have perished. The world is one vast charnel house, its material being worked over and over again in endless cycle. Tooth and claw to rend and tear; arrow, club, spear, sword, and gun to kill; the weak to fall, the strong and brutal to triumph, to multiply, and advance by the slaughter of its own weaker members. The atom you can not see with unaided eye devours and is devoured, and ascending to man, he is by turns the slayer and the slain.

If you seek for a meaning or a purpose you will find none. What you call design is only the harmony of fluctuating chances produced by countless failures.

Philosophy.—Invoke philosophy with her robes of snow, pretending to a knowledge of the world and its infinite destiny; it will tell you of the cycle of being; the succession of generations; that life and death complement each other, and that all you may hope for is change. Unceasing change is the abiding law, and he who grasps to hold, will find but shadows in his grasp.

Religion.—Religion may teach us a pessimistic view of the world, and to bow like cringing slaves unquestioningly to the rod. We may accept that all is for the best whether we understand it or not, as the unalterable decree of fate, yet as rational beings we recoil from this bondage, and the questions are ever present, of the purpose of this life and the evidences of that future of which the most doubting dream.

Religion, resting as it does on the immortality of the spirit, should answer us so plainly and absolutely that there could be no doubt. That there is weeping and broken hearts shows that it does not, or else that it makes that existence so terrible that the dread of it is more than that of annihilation. The fear of Hell, which has driven the world to madness, is now cast into the lumber room with other errors, outgrown, and in the free atmosphere one can not understand the terrors it once awakened. The arbitrary heaven is also passing away, and a more natural conception of the future life is gaining precedent. Yet the words of teachers of religion are cold and soulless, and even the poets, touched by the finger of a decaying faith, voice the incredulity of the age in lines which speak only in despair. Oh! poet of immortal song, how chilling to the heart the words that yet too often find response in its doubts and fears:

There is little consolation to be found in these directions. Let us turn back to first principles; let us for a time forget the claims of scientists and take up the book of nature at her plain alphabet and ascertain whether these claims of material science have a sure foundation.