Part 5 — Chapter I. Preliminary. (continued 2)

Mark 8:36, 37—“For what doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life [or “soul,” ψυχή]? For what should a man give in exchange for his life [or ‘soul,’ ψυχή]?”

(f) The passages chiefly relied upon as supporting trichotomy may be better explained upon the view already indicated, that soul and spirit are not two distinct substances or parts, but that they designate the immaterial principle from different points of view.

1 Thess. 5:23—“may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire” = not a scientific enumeration of the constituent parts of human nature, but a comprehensive sketch of that nature in its chief relations; compare Mark 12:30—“thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength”—where none would think of finding proof of a fourfold division of human nature. On 1 Thess. 5:23, see Riggenbach (in Lange's Com.), and Commentary of Prof. W. A. Stevens. Heb. 4:12—“piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow” = not the dividing of soul from spirit, or of joints from marrow, but rather the piercing of the soul and of the spirit, even to their very joints and marrow; i. e., to the very depths of the spiritual nature. On Heb. 4:12, see Ebrard (in Olshausen's Com.), and Lünemann (in Meyer's Com.); also Tholuck, Com. in loco. Jude 19—“sensual, having not the Spirit” (ψυχικοί, πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες)—even though πνεῦμα = the human spirit, need not mean that there is no spirit existing, but only that the spirit is torpid and inoperative—as we say of a weak man: “he has no mind,” or of an unprincipled man: “he has no conscience”; so Alford; see Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine, 202. But πνεῦμα here probably = the divine πνεῦμα. Meyer takes this view, and the Revised Version capitalizes the word “Spirit.” See Goodwin, Soc. Bib. Exegesis, 1881:85—“The distinction between ψυχή and πνεῦμα is a functional, and not a substantial, distinction.”Moule, Outlines of Christian Doctrine, 161, 162—“Soul = spirit organized, inseparably linked with the body; spirit = man's inner being considered as God's gift. Soul = man's inner being viewed as his own; spirit = man's inner being viewed as from God. They are not separate elements.” See Lightfoot, Essay on St. Paul and Seneca, appended to his Com. on Philippians, on the influence of the ethical language of Stoicism on the N. T. writers. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 39—“The difference between man and his companion creatures on this earth is not that his instinctive life is less than theirs, for in truth it goes far beyond them; but that in him it acts in the presence and under the eye of other powers which transform it, and by giving to it vision as well as light take its blindness away. He is let into his own secrets.”

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We conclude that the immaterial part of man, viewed as an individual and conscious life, capable of possessing and animating a physical organism, is called ψυχή; viewed as a rational and moral agent, susceptible of divine influence and indwelling, this same immaterial part is called πνεῦμα. The πνεῦμα, then, is man's nature looking Godward, and capable of receiving and manifesting the Πνεῦμα ἅγιον; the ψυχή is man's nature looking earthward, and touching the world of sense. The πνεῦμα is man's higher part, as related to spiritual realities or as capable of such relation; the ψυχή is man's higher part, as related to the body, or as capable of such relation. Man's being is therefore not trichotomous but dichotomous, and his immaterial part, while possessing duality of powers, has unity of substance.

Man's nature is not a three-storied house, but a two-storied house, with windows in the upper story looking in two directions—toward earth and toward heaven. The lower story is the physical part of us—the body. But man's “upper story” has two aspects; there is an outlook toward things below, and a skylight through which to see the stars. “Soul” says Hovey, “is spirit as modified by union with the body.” Is man then the same in kind with the brute, but different in degree? No, man is different in kind, though possessed of certain powers which the brute has. The frog is not a magnified sensitive-plant, though his nerves automatically respond to irritation. The animal is different in kind from the vegetable, though he has some of the same powers which the vegetable has. God's powers include man's; but man is not of the same substance with God, nor could man be enlarged or developed into God. So man's powers include those of the brute, but the brute is not of the same substance with man, nor could he be enlarged or developed into man.

Porter, Human Intellect, 39—“The spirit of man, in addition to its higher endowments, may also possess the lower powers which vitalize dead matter into a human body.” It does not follow that the soul of the animal or plant is capable of man's higher functions or developments, or that the subjection of man's spirit to body, in the present life, disproves his immortality. Porter continues: “That the soul begins to exist as a vital force, does not require that it should always exist as such a force or in connection with a material body. Should it require another such body, it may have the power to create it for itself, as it has formed the one it first inhabited; or it may have already formed it, and may hold it ready for occupation and use as soon as it sloughs off the one which connects it with the earth.”

Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 547—“Brutes may have organic life and sensitivity, and yet remain submerged in nature. It is not life and sensitivity that lift man above nature, but it is the distinctive characteristic of personality.” Parkhurst, The Pattern in the Mount, 17-30, on Prov. 20:27—“The spirit of man is the lamp of Jehovah”—not necessarily lighted, but capable of being lighted, and intended to be lighted, by the touch of the divine flame. Cf. Mat. 6:22, 23—“The lamp of the body.... If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness.”

Schleiermacher, Christliche Glaube, 2:487—“We think of the spirit as soul, only when in the body, so that we cannot speak of an immortality of the soul, in the proper sense, without bodily life.” The doctrine of the spiritual body is therefore the complement to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 221—“By soul we mean only one thing, i. e., an incarnate spirit, a spirit with a body. Thus we never speak of the souls of angels. They are pure spirits, having no bodies.”Lisle, Evolution of Spiritual Man, 72—“The animal is the foundation of the spiritual; it is what the cellar is to the house; it is the base of supplies.” Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 371-378—“Trichotomy is absolutely untenable on grounds of psychological science. Man's reason, or the spirit that is in man, is not to be regarded as a sort of Mansard roof, built on to one building in a block, all the dwellings in which are otherwise substantially alike.... On the contrary, in every set of characteristics, from those called lowest to those pronounced highest, the soul of man differences itself from the soul of any species of animals.... The highest has also the lowest. All must be assigned to one subject.”

This view of the soul and spirit as different aspects of the same spiritual principle furnishes a refutation of six important errors:

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(a) That of the Gnostics, who held that the πνεῦμα is part of the divine essence, and therefore incapable of sin.

(b) That of the Apollinarians, who taught that Christ's humanity embraced only σῶμα and ψυχή, while his divine nature furnished the πνεῦμα.

(c) That of the Semi-Pelagians, who excepted the human πνεῦμα from the dominion of original sin.

(d) That of Placeus, who held that only the πνεῦμα was directly created by God (see our section on Theories of Imputation).

(e) That of Julius Müller, who held that the ψυχή comes to us from Adam, but that our πνεῦμα was corrupted in a previous state of being (see page 490).

(f) That of the Annihilationists, who hold that man at his creation had a divine element breathed into him, which he lost by sin, and which he recovers only in regeneration; so that only when he has this πνεῦμα restored by virtue of his union with Christ does man become immortal, death being to the sinner a complete extinction of being.

Tacitus might almost be understood to be a trichotomist when he writes: “Si ut sapientibus placuit, non extinguuntur cum corpora magnæ animæ.” Trichotomy allies itself readily with materialism. Many trichotomists hold that man can exist without a πνεῦμα, but that the σῶμα and the ψυχή by themselves are mere matter, and are incapable of eternal existence. Trichotomy, however, when it speaks of the πνεῦμα as the divine principle in man, seems to savor of emanation or of pantheism. A modern English poet describes the glad and winsome child as “A silver stream, Breaking with laughter from the lake divine, Whence all things flow.” Another poet, Robert Browning, in his Death in the Desert, 107, describes body, soul, and spirit, as “What does, what knows, what is—three souls, one man.”

The Eastern church generally held to trichotomy, and is best represented by John of Damascus (11:12) who speaks of the soul as the sensuous life-principle which takes up the spirit—the spirit being an efflux from God. The Western church, on the other hand, generally held to dichotomy, and is best represented by Anselm: “Constat homo ex duabus naturis, ex natura animæ et ex natura carnis.”

Luther has been quoted upon both sides of the controversy: by Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 460-462, as trichotomous, and as making the Mosaic tabernacle with its three divisions an image of the tripartite man. “The first division,” he says, “was called the holy of holies, since God dwelt there, and there was no light therein. The next was denominated the holy place, for within it stood a candlestick with seven branches and lamps. The third was called the atrium or court; this was under the broad heaven, and was open to the light of the sun. A regenerate man is depicted in this figure. His spirit is the holy of holies, God's dwelling-place, in the darkness of faith, without a light, for he believes what he neither sees, nor feels, nor comprehends. The psyche of that man is the holy place, whose seven lights represent the various powers of understanding, the perception and knowledge of material and visible things. His body is the atrium or court, which is open to everybody, so that all can see how he acts and lives.”

Thomasius, however, in his Christi Person und Werk, 1:164-168, quotes from Luther the following statement, which is clearly dichotomous: “The first part, the spirit, is the highest, deepest, noblest part of man. By it he is fitted to comprehend eternal things, and it is, in short, the house in which dwell faith and the word of God. The other, the soul, is this same spirit, according to nature, but yet in another sort of activity, namely, in this, that it animates the body and works through it; and it is its method not to grasp things incomprehensible, but only what reason can search out, know, and measure.” Thomasius himself says: “Trichotomy, I hold with Meyer, is not Scripturally sustained.” Neander, sometimes spoken of as a trichotomist, says that spirit is soul in its elevated and normal relation to God and divine things; ψυχή is that same soul in its relation to the sensuous and perhaps sinful things of this world. Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 32—“Spirit = the breath of God, considered as independent of the body; soul = that same breath, in so far as it gives life to the body.”

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The doctrine we have advocated, moreover, in contrast with the heathen view, puts honor upon man's body, as proceeding from the hand of God and as therefore originally pure (Gen. 1:31—“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good”); as intended to be the dwelling place of the divine Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”); and as containing the germ of the heavenly body (1 Cor. 15:44—“it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body”; Rom. 8:11—“shall give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you”—here many ancient authorities read “because of his Spirit that dwelleth in you”—διά τὸ ἐνοικοῦν αὐτοῦ πνεῦμα). Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief, suggests that man, unlike angels, may have been provided with a fleshly body, (1) to objectify sin, and (2) to enable Christ to unite himself to the race, in order to save it.

IV. Origin of the Soul.

Three theories with regard to this subject have divided opinion:

1. The Theory of Preëxistence.

This view was held by Plato, Philo, and Origen; by the first, in order to explain the soul's possession of ideas not derived from sense; by the second, to account for its imprisonment in the body; by the third, to justify the disparity of conditions in which men enter the world. We concern ourselves, however, only with the forms which the view has assumed in modern times. Kant and Julius Müller in Germany, and Edward Beecher in America, have advocated it, upon the ground that the inborn depravity of the human will can be explained only by supposing a personal act of self-determination in a previous, or timeless, state of being.

The truth at the basis of the theory of preëxistence is simply the ideal existence of the soul, before birth, in the mind of God—that is, God's foreknowledge of it. The intuitive ideas of which the soul finds itself in possession, such as space, time, cause, substance, right, God, are evolved from itself; in other words, man is so constituted that he perceives these truths upon proper occasions or conditions. The apparent recollection that we have seen at some past time a landscape which we know to be now for the first time before us, is an illusory putting together of fragmentary concepts or a mistaking of a part for the whole; we have seen something like a part of the landscape,—we fancy that we have seen this landscape, and the whole of it. Our recollection of a past event or scene is one whole, but this one idea may have an indefinite number of subordinate ideas existing within it. The sight of something which is similar to one of these parts suggests the past whole. Coleridge: “The great law of the imagination that likeness in part tends to become likeness of the whole.” Augustine hinted that this illusion of memory may have played an important part in developing the belief in metempsychosis.

Other explanations are those of William James, in his Psychology: The brain tracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, are different; Baldwin, Psychology, 263, 264: We may remember what we have seen in a dream, or there may be a revival of ancestral or race experiences. Still others suggest that the two hemispheres of the brain act asynchronously; self-consciousness or apperception is distinguished from perception; divorce, from fatigue, of the processes of sensation and perception, causes paramnesia. Sully, Illusions, 280, speaks of an organic or atavistic memory: “May it not happen that by the law of hereditary transmission ... ancient experiences will now and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise to apparently personal recollections?” Letson, The Crowd, believes that the mob is atavistic and that it bases its action upon inherited impulses: “The inherited reflexes are atavistic memories” (quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 204).

Plato held that intuitive ideas are reminiscences of things learned in a previous state of being; he regarded the body as the grave of the soul; and urged the fact that the soul had knowledge before it entered the body, as proof that the soul would have knowledge after it left the body, that is, would be immortal. See Plato, Meno, 82-85, Phædo, 72-75, Phædrus, 245-250, Republic, 5:460 and 10:614. Alexander, Theories of the Will, 36, 37—“Plato represents preëxistent souls as having set before them a choice of virtue. The choice is free, but it will determine the destiny of each soul. Not God, but he who [pg 489]chooses, is responsible for his choice. After making their choice, the souls go to the fates, who spin the threads of their destiny, and it is thenceforth irreversible. As Christian theology teaches that man was free but lost his freedom by the fall of Adam, so Plato affirms that the preëxistent soul is free until it has chosen its lot in life.” See Introductions to the above mentioned works of Plato in Jowett's translation. Philo held that all souls are emanations from God, and that those who allowed themselves, unlike the angels, to be attracted by matter, are punished for this fall by imprisonment in the body, which corrupts them, and from which they must break loose. See Philo, De Gigantibus, Pfeiffer's ed., 2:360-364. Origen accounted for disparity of conditions at birth by the differences in the conduct of these same souls in a previous state. God's justice at the first made all souls equal; condition here corresponds to the degree of previous guilt; Mat. 20:3—“others standing in the market place idle” = souls not yet brought into the world. The Talmudists regarded all souls as created at once in the beginning, and as kept like grains of corn in God's granary, until the time should come for joining each to its appointed body. See Origen, De Anima, 7; περὶ ἀρχῶν, ii:9:6; cf. i:1:2, 4, 18; 4:36. Origen's view was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople, 538. Many of the preceding facts and references are taken from Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733.

For modern advocates of the theory, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, sec. 15; Religion in. d. Grenzen d. bl. Vernunft, 26, 27; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:357-401; Edward Beecher, Conflict of Ages. The idea of preëxistence has appeared to a notable extent in modern poetry. See Vaughan, The Retreate (1621); Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood; Tennyson, Two Voices, stanzas 105-119, and Early Sonnets, 25—“As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, And ebb into a former life, or seem To lapse far back in some confused dream To states of mystical similitude; If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair, Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, So that we say ‘All this hath been before, All this hath been, I know not when or where.’ So, friend, when first I looked upon your face, Our thought gave answer each to each, so true—Opposed mirrors each reflecting each—That though I knew not in what time or place, Methought that I had often met with you, And either lived in either's heart and speech.” Robert Browning, La Saisiaz, and Christina: “Ages past the soul existed; Here an age 'tis resting merely, And hence fleets again for ages.” Rossetti, House of Life: “I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell; I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights along the shore. You have been mine before, How long ago I may not know; But just when, at that swallow's soar, Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall—I knew it all of yore”; quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 103-106, who holds the phenomenon due to false induction and interpretation.

Briggs, School, College and Character, 95—“Some of us remember the days when we were on earth for the first time;”—which reminds us of the boy who remembered sitting in a corner before he was born and crying for fear he would be a girl. A more notable illustration is that found in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by Lockhart, his son-in-law, 8:274—“Yesterday, at dinner time, I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of preëxistence—viz., a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time—that the same topics had been discussed and the same persons had started the same opinions on them. It is true there might have been some ground for recollections, considering that three at least of the company were old friends and had kept much company together.... But the sensation was so strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the desert, or a calenture on board of ship, when lakes are seen in the desert and sylvan landscapes in the sea. It was very distressing yesterday and brought to mind the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal world. There was a vile sense of want of reality in all I did and said.... I drank several glasses of wine, but these only aggravated the disorder. I did not find the in vino veritas of the philosophers.”

To the theory of preëxistence we urge the following objections:

(a) It is not only wholly without support from Scripture, but it directly contradicts the Mosaic account of man's creation in the image of God, and Paul's description of all evil and death in the human race as the result of Adam's sin.

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Gen. 1:27—“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him”; 31—“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Rom. 5:12—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned.” The theory of preëxistence would still leave it doubtful whether all men are sinners, or whether God assembles only sinners upon the earth.

(b) If the soul in this preëxistent state was conscious and personal, it is inexplicable that we should have no remembrance of such preëxistence, and of so important a decision in that previous condition of being;—if the soul was yet unconscious and impersonal, the theory fails to show how a moral act involving consequences so vast could have been performed at all.

Christ remembered his preëxistent state; why should not we? There is every reason to believe that in the future state we shall remember our present existence; why should we not now remember the past state from which we came? It may be objected that Augustinians hold to a sin of the race in Adam—a sin which none of Adam's descendants can remember. But we reply that no Augustinian holds to a personal existence of each member of the race in Adam, and therefore no Augustinian needs to account for lack of memory of Adam's sin. The advocate of preëxistence, however, does hold to a personal existence of each soul in a previous state, and therefore needs to account for our lack of memory of it.

(c) The view sheds no light either upon the origin of sin, or upon God's justice in dealing with it, since it throws back the first transgression to a state of being in which there was no flesh to tempt, and then represents God as putting the fallen into sensuous conditions in the highest degree unfavorable to their restoration.

This theory only increases the difficulty of explaining the origin of sin, by pushing back its beginning to a state of which we know less than we do of the present. To say that the soul in that previous state was only potentially conscious and personal, is to deny any real probation, and to throw the blame of sin on God the Creator. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:228—“In modern times, the philosophers Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer have explained the bad from an intelligible act of freedom, which (according to Schelling and Schopenhauer) also at the same time effectuates the temporal existence and condition of the individual soul. But what are we to think of as meant by such a mystical deed or act through which the subject of it first comes into existence? Is it not this, that perhaps under this singular disguise there is concealed the simple thought that the origin of the bad lies not so much in a doing of the individual freedom as rather in the rise of it,—that is to say, in the process of development through which the natural man becomes a moral man, and the merely potentially rational man becomes an actually rational man?”

(d) While this theory accounts for inborn spiritual sin, such as pride and enmity to God, it gives no explanation of inherited sensual sin, which it holds to have come from Adam, and the guilt of which must logically be denied.

While certain forms of the preëxistence theory are exposed to the last objection indicated in the text, Julius Müller claims that his own view escapes it; see Doctrine of Sin, 2:393. His theory, he says, “would contradict holy Scripture if it derived inborn sinfulness solely from this extra-temporal act of the individual, without recognizing in this sinfulness the element of hereditary depravity in the sphere of the natural life, and its connection with the sin of our first parents.” Müller, whose trichotomy here determines his whole subsequent scheme, holds only the πνεῦμα to have thus fallen in a preëxistent state. The ψυχή comes, with the body, from Adam. The tempter only brought man's latent perversity of will into open transgression. Sinfulness, as hereditary, does not involve guilt, but the hereditary principle is the “medium through which the transcendent self-perversion of the spiritual nature of man is transmitted to his whole temporal mode of being.” While man is born guilty as to his πνεῦμα, for the reason that this πνεῦμα sinned in a preëxistent state, he is also born guilty as to his ψυχή, because this was one with the first man in his transgression.

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Even upon the most favorable statement of Müller's view, we fail to see how it can consist with the organic unity of the race; for in that which chiefly constitutes us men—the πνεῦμα—we are as distinct and separate creations as are the angels. We also fail to see how, upon this view, Christ can be said to take our nature; or, if he takes it, how it can be without sin. See Ernesti, Ursprung der Sünde, 2:1-247; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 11-17: Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:92-122; Bruch, Lehre der Präexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733. Also Bib. Sac., 11:186-191; 12:156; 17:419-427; 20:447; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:250—“This doctrine is inconsistent with the indisputable fact that the souls of children are like those of the parents; and it ignores the connection of the individual with the race.”

2. The Creatian Theory.

This view was held by Aristotle, Jerome, and Pelagius, and in modern times has been advocated by most of the Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians. It regards the soul of each human being as immediately created by God and joined to the body either at conception, at birth, or at some time between these two. The advocates of the theory urge in its favor certain texts of Scripture, referring to God as the Creator of the human spirit, together with the fact that there is a marked individuality in the child, which cannot be explained as a mere reproduction of the qualities existing in the parents.

Creatianism, as ordinarily held, regards only the body as propagated from past generations. Creatianists who hold to trichotomy would say, however, that the animal soul, the ψυχή, is propagated with the body, while the highest part of man, the πνεῦμα, is in each case a direct creation of God,—the πνεῦμα not being created, as the advocates of preëxistence believe, ages before the body, but rather at the time that the body assumes its distinct individuality.

Aristotle (De Anima) first gives definite expression to this view. Jerome speaks of God as “making souls daily.” The scholastics followed Aristotle, and through the influence of the Reformed church, creatianism has been the prevailing opinion for the last two hundred years. Among its best representatives are Turretin, Inst., 5:13 (vol. 1:425); Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:65-76; Martensen, Dogmatics, 141-148; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 99-106. Certain Reformed theologians have defined very exactly God's method of creation. Polanus (5:31:1) says that God breathes the soul into boys, forty days, and into girls, eighty days, after conception. Göschel (in Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Seele) holds that while dichotomy leads to traducianism, trichotomy allies itself to that form of creatianism which regards the πνεῦμα as a direct creation of God, but the ψυχή as propagated with the body. To the latter answers the family name; to the former the Christian name. Shall we count George Macdonald as a believer in Preëxistence or in Creatianism, when he writes in his Baby's Catechism: “Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into here. Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky, as I came through. Where did you get that little tear? I found it waiting when I got here. Where did you get that pearly ear? God spoke, and it came out to hear. How did they all just come to be you? God thought about me, and so I grew.”

Creatianism is untenable for the following reasons:

(a) The passages adduced in its support may with equal propriety be regarded as expressing God's mediate agency in the origination of human souls; while the general tenor of Scripture, as well as its representations of God as the author of man's body, favor this latter interpretation.

Passages commonly relied upon by creatianists are the following: Eccl. 12:7—“the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Is. 57:16—“the souls that I have made”; Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah ... who formeth the spirit of man within him”; Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.” But God is with equal clearness declared to be the former of man's body: see Ps. 139:13, 14—“thou didst form my inward parts: Thou didst cover me [marg. “knit me together”] in my mother's womb. I will give thanks unto thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Wonderful are thy works”; Jer. 1:5—“I formed thee in the belly.” Yet we do not hesitate to interpret these latter passages as expressive of mediate, not immediate, [pg 492]creatorship,—God works through natural laws of generation and development so far as the production of man's body is concerned. None of the passages first mentioned forbid us to suppose that he works through these same natural laws in the production of the soul. The truth in creatianism is the presence and operation of God in all natural processes. A transcendent God manifests himself in all physical begetting. Shakespeare: “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 112—“Creatianism, which emphasizes the divine origin of man, is entirely compatible with Traducianism, which emphasizes the mediation of natural agencies. So for the race as a whole, its origin in a creative activity of God is quite consistent with its being a product of natural evolution.”

(b) Creatianism regards the earthly father as begetting only the body of his child—certainly as not the father of the child's highest part. This makes the beast to possess nobler powers of propagation than man; for the beast multiplies himself after his own image.

The new physiology properly views soul, not as something added from without, but as the animating principle of the body from the beginning and as having a determining influence upon its whole development. That children are like their parents, in intellectual and spiritual as well as in physical respects, is a fact of which the creatian theory gives no proper explanation. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 115—“The love of parents to children and of children to parents protests against the doctrine that only the body is propagated.” Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith, 207,—quoted in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:876—“Instead of the physical derivation of the soul, we stand for the spiritual derivation of the body.” We would amend this statement by saying that we stand for the spiritual derivation of both soul and body, natural law being only the operation of spirit, human and divine.

(c) The individuality of the child, even in the most extreme cases, as in the sudden rise from obscure families and surroundings of marked men like Luther, may be better explained by supposing a law of variation impressed upon the species at its beginning—a law whose operation is foreseen and supervised by God.

The differences of the child from the parent are often exaggerated; men are generally more the product of their ancestry and of their time than we are accustomed to think. Dickens made angelic children to be born of depraved parents, and to grow up in the slums. But this writing belongs to a past generation, when the facts of heredity were unrecognized. George Eliot's school is nearer the truth; although she exaggerates the doctrine of heredity in turn, until all idea of free will and all hope of escaping our fate vanish. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 78, 90—“Separate motives, handed down from generation to generation, sometimes remaining latent for great periods, to become suddenly manifested under conditions the nature of which is not discernible.... Conflict of inheritances [from different ancestors] may lead to the institution of variety.”

Sometimes, in spite of George Eliot, a lily grows out of a stagnant pool—how shall we explain the fact? We must remember that the paternal and the maternal elements are themselves unlike; the union of the two may well produce a third in some respects unlike either; as, when two chemical elements unite, the product differs from either of the constituents. We must remember also that nature is one factor; nurture is another; and that the latter is often as potent as the former (see Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 77-81). Environment determines to a large extent both the fact and the degree of development. Genius is often another name for Providence. Yet before all and beyond all we must recognize a manifold wisdom of God, which in the very organization of species impresses upon it a law of variation, so that at proper times and under proper conditions the old is modified in the line of progress and advance to something higher. Dante, Purgatory, canto vii—“Rarely into the branches of the tree Doth human worth mount up; and so ordains He that bestows it, that as his free gift It may be called.” Pompilia, the noblest character in Robert Browning's Ring and the Book, came of “a bad lot.” Geo. A. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 123-126—“It is mockery to account for Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns and William Shakespeare upon naked principles of heredity and environment.... All intelligence and all high character are [pg 493]transcendent, and have their source in the mind and heart of God. It is in the range of Christ's transcendence of his earthly conditions that we note the complete uniqueness of his person.”

(d) This theory, if it allows that the soul is originally possessed of depraved tendencies, makes God the direct author of moral evil; if it holds the soul to have been created pure, it makes God indirectly the author of moral evil, by teaching that he puts this pure soul into a body which will inevitably corrupt it.

The decisive argument against creatianism is this one, that it makes God the author of moral evil. See Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:250—“Creatianism rests upon a justly antiquated dualism between soul and body, and is irreconcilable with the sinful condition of the human soul. The truth in the doctrine is just this only, that generation can bring forth an immortal human life only according to the power imparted by God's word, and with the special coöperation of God himself.” The difficulty of supposing that God immediately creates a pure soul, only to put it into a body that will infallibly corrupt it—“sicut vinum in vase acetoso”—has led many of the most thoughtful Reformed theologians to modify the creatian doctrine by combining it with traducianism.

Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:249-251, holds to creatianism in a wider sense—a union of the paternal and maternal elements under the express and determining efficiency of God. Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:327-332, regards the soul as new-created, yet by a process of mediate creation according to law, which he calls “metaphysical generation.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:56, says that the individual is not simply a manifestation of the species; God applies to the origination of every single man a special creative thought and act of will; yet he does this through the species, so that it is creation by law,—else the child would be, not a continuation of the old species, but the establishment of a new one. So in speaking of the human soul of Christ, Dorner says (3:340-349) that the soul itself does not owe its origin to Mary nor to the species, but to the creative act of God. This soul appropriates to itself from Mary's body the elements of a human form, purifying them in the process so far as is consistent with the beginning of a life yet subject to development and human weakness.

Bowne, Metaphysics, 500—“The laws of heredity must be viewed simply as descriptions of a fact and never as its explanation. Not as if ancestors passed on something to posterity, but solely because of the inner consistency of the divine action” are children like their parents. We cannot regard either of these mediating views as self-consistent or intelligible. We pass on therefore to consider the traducian theory which we believe more fully to meet the requirements of Scripture and of reason. For further discussion of creatianism, see Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 18-58; Alger, Doctrine of a Future Life, 1-17.

3. The Traducian Theory.

This view was propounded by Tertullian, and was implicitly held by Augustine. In modern times it has been the prevailing opinion of the Lutheran Church. It holds that the human race was immediately created in Adam, and, as respects both body and soul, was propagated from him by natural generation—all souls since Adam being only mediately created by God, as the upholder of the laws of propagation which were originally established by him.

Tertullian, De Anima: “Tradux peccati, tradux animæ.” Gregory of Nyssa: “Man being one, consisting of soul and body, the common beginning of his constitution must be supposed also one; so that he may not be both older and younger than himself—that in him which is bodily being first, and the other coming after” (quoted in Crippen, Hist. of Christ. Doct., 80). Augustine, De Pec. Mer. et Rem., 3:7—“In Adam all sinned, at the time when in his nature all were still that one man”; De Civ. Dei, 13:14—“For we all were in that one man, when we all were that one man.... The form in which we each should live was not as yet individually created and distributed to us, but there already existed the seminal nature from which we were propagated.”

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Augustine, indeed, wavered in his statements with regard to the origin of the soul, apparently fearing that an explicit and pronounced traducianism might involve materialistic consequences; yet, as logically lying at the basis of his doctrine of original sin, traducianism came to be the ruling view of the Lutheran reformers. In his Table Talk, Luther says: “The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay, in the way Adam was fashioned; as I should have counseled him also to let the sun remain always suspended over the earth, like a great lamp, maintaining perpetual light and heat.”

Traducianism holds that man, as a species, was created in Adam. In Adam, the substance of humanity was yet undistributed. We derive our immaterial as well as our material being, by natural laws of propagation, from Adam,—each individual man after Adam possessing a part of the substance that was originated in him. Sexual reproduction has for its purpose the keeping of variations within limit. Every marriage tends to bring back the individual type to that of the species. The offspring represents not one of the parents but both. And, as each of these parents represents two grandparents, the offspring really represents the whole race. Without this conjugation the individual peculiarities would reproduce themselves in divergent lines like the shot from a shot-gun. Fission needs to be supplemented by conjugation. The use of sexual reproduction is to preserve the average individual in the face of a progressive tendency to variation. In asexual reproduction the offspring start on deviating lines and never mix their qualities with those of their mates. Sexual reproduction makes the individual the type of the species and gives solidarity to the race. See Maupas, quoted by Newman Smith, Place of Death in Evolution, 19-22.

John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is a Traducian. He has no faith in the notion of a soul separate from and inhabiting the body. He believes in a certain corporeity of the soul. Mind and thought are rooted in the bodily organism. Soul was not inbreathed after the body was formed. The breathing of God into man's nostrils was only the quickening impulse to that which already had life. God does not create souls every day. Man is a body-and-soul, or a soul-body, and he transmits himself as such. Harris, Moral Evolution, 171—The individual man has a great number of ancestors as well as a great number of descendants. He is the central point of an hour-glass, or a strait between two seas which widen out behind and before. How then shall we escape the conclusion that the human race was most numerous at the beginning? We must remember that other children have the same great-grandparents with ourselves; that there have been inter-marriages; and that, after all, the generations run on in parallel lines, that the lines spread a little in some countries and periods, and narrow a little in other countries and periods. It is like a wall covered with paper in diamond pattern. The lines diverge and converge, but the figures are parallel. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:7-94, Hist. Doctrine, 2:1-26, Discourses and Essays, 259; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 137-151, 335-384; Edwards, Works, 2:483; Hopkins, Works, 1:289; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 161; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 128-142; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 59-224.

With regard to this view we remark:

(a) It seems best to accord with Scripture, which represents God as creating the species in Adam (Gen. 1:27), and as increasing and perpetuating it through secondary agencies (1:28; cf. 22). Only once is breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life (2:7, cf. 22; 1 Cor. 11:8. Gen. 4:1; 5:3; 46:26; cf. Acts 17:21-26; Heb. 7:10), and after man's formation God ceases from his work of creation (Gen. 2:2).

Gen. 1:27—“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him: male and female created he them”; 28—“And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”; cf. 22—of the brute creation: “And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” Gen. 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; cf. 22—“and the rib which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man”; 1 Cor. 11:8—“For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man” (ἐξ ἀνδρός). Gen. 4:1—“Eve ... bare Cain”; 5:3—“Adam ... begat a son ... Seth”; 46:26—“All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, that came out of his loins”; Acts 17:26—“he made of one [“father” or “body”] every nation of men”; Heb. 7:10—Levi “was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedek met him”; Gen. 2:2—“And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made, [pg 495]and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:19-29, adduces also John 1:13; 3:6; Rom. 1:13; 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:22; Eph. 2:3; Heb. 12:9; Ps. 139:15, 16. Only Adam had the right to be a creatianist. Westcott, Com. on Hebrews, 114—“Levi paying tithes in Abraham implies that descendants are included in the ancestor so far that his acts have force for them. Physically, at least, the dead so rule the living. The individual is not a completely self-centred being. He is member in a body. So far traducianism is true. But, if this were all, man would be a mere result of the past, and would have no individual responsibility. There is an element not derived from birth, though it may follow upon it. Recognition of individuality is the truth in creatianism. Power of vision follows upon preparation of an organ of vision, modified by the latter but not created by it. So we have the social unity of the race, plus the personal responsibility of the individual, the influence of common thoughts plus the power of great men, the foundation of hope plus the condition of judgment.”

(b) It is favored by the analogy of vegetable and animal life, in which increase of numbers is secured, not by a multiplicity of immediate creations, but by the natural derivation of new individuals from a parent stock. A derivation of the human soul from its parents no more implies a materialistic view of the soul and its endless division and subdivision, than the similar derivation of the brute proves the principle of intelligence in the lower animals to be wholly material.

God's method is not the method of endless miracle. God works in nature through second causes. God does not create a new vital principle at the beginning of existence of each separate apple, and of each separate dog. Each of these is the result of a self-multiplying force, implanted once for all in the first of its race. To say, with Moxom (Baptist Review, 1881:278), that God is the immediate author of each new individual, is to deny second causes, and to merge nature in God. The whole tendency of modern science is in the opposite direction. Nor is there any good reason for making the origin of the individual human soul an exception to the general rule. Augustine wavered in his traducianism because he feared the inference that the soul is divided and subdivided,—that is, that it is composed of parts, and is therefore material in its nature. But it does not follow that all separation is material separation. We do not, indeed, know how the soul is propagated. But we know that animal life is propagated, and still that it is not material, nor composed of parts. The fact that the soul is not material, nor composed of parts, is no reason why it may not be propagated also.

It is well to remember that substance does not necessarily imply either extension or figure. Substantia is simply that which stands under, underlies, supports, or in other words that which is the ground of phenomena. The propagation of mind therefore does not involve any dividing up, or splitting off, as if the mind were a material mass. Flame is propagated, but not by division and subdivision. Professor Ladd is a creatianist, together with Lotze, whom he quotes, but he repudiates the idea that the mind is susceptible of division; see Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206, 359-366—“The mind comes from nowhere, for it never was, as mind, in space, is not now in space, and cannot be conceived of as coming and going in space.... Mind is a growth.... Parents do not transmit their minds to their offspring. The child's mind does not exist before it acts. Its activities are its existence.” So we might say that flame has no existence before it acts. Yet it may owe its existence to a preceding flame. The Indian proverb is: “No lotus without a stem.” Hall Caine, in his novel The Manxman, tells us that the Deemster of the Isle of Man had two sons. These two sons were as unlike each other as are the inside and the outside of a bowl. But the bowl was old Deemster himself. Hartley Coleridge inherited his father's imperious desire for stimulants and with it his inability to resist their temptation.

(c) The observed transmission not merely of physical, but of mental and spiritual, characteristics in families and races, and especially the uniformly evil moral tendencies and dispositions which all men possess from their birth, are proof that in soul, as well as in body, we derive our being from our human ancestry.

Galton, in his Hereditary Genius, and Inquiries into Human Faculty, furnishes abundant proof of the transmission of mental and spiritual characteristics from father [pg 496]to son. Illustrations, in the case of families, are the American Adamses, the English Georges, the French Bourbons, the German Bachs. Illustrations, in the case of races, are the Indians, the Negroes, the Chinese, the Jews. Hawthorne represented the introspection and the conscience of Puritan New England. Emerson had a minister among his ancestry, either on the paternal or the maternal side, for eight generations back. Every man is “a chip of the old block.” “A man is an omnibus, in which all his ancestors are seated” (O. W. Holmes). Variation is one of the properties of living things,—the other is transmission. “On a dissecting table, in the membranes of a new-born infant's body, can be seen ‘the drunkard's tinge.’ The blotches on his grand-child's cheeks furnish a mirror to the old debauchee. Heredity is God's visiting of sin to the third and fourth generations.” On heredity and depravity, see Phelps, in Bib. Sac., Apr. 1884:254—“When every molecule in the paternal brain bears the shape of a point of interrogation, it would border on the miraculous if we should find the exclamation-sign of faith in the brain-cells of the child.”

Robert G. Ingersoll said that most great men have great mothers, and that most great women have great fathers. Most of the great are like mountains, with the valley of ancestors on one side and the depression of posterity on the other. Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables illustrates the principle of heredity. But in his Marble Faun and Transformation, Hawthorne unwisely intimates that sin is a necessity to virtue, a background or condition of good. Dryden, Absalom and Ahithophel, 1:156—“Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” Lombroso, The Man of Genius, maintains that genius is a mental disease allied to epileptiform mania or the dementia of cranks. If this were so, we should infer that civilization is the result of insanity, and that, so soon as Napoleons, Dantes and Newtons manifest themselves, they should be confined in Genius Asylums. Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau, comes nearer the truth: “A solitary great man's worth the world. God takes the business into his own hands At such time: Who creates the novel flower Contrives to guard and give it breathing-room.... 'Tis the great Gardener grafts the excellence On wildlings, where he will.”

(d) The traducian doctrine embraces and acknowledges the element of truth which gives plausibility to the creatian view. Traducianism, properly defined, admits a divine concurrence throughout the whole development of the human species, and allows, under the guidance of a superintending Providence, special improvements in type at the birth of marked men, similar to those which we may suppose to have occurred in the introduction of new varieties in the animal creation.

Page-Roberts, Oxford University Sermons: “It is no more unjust that man should inherit evil tendencies, than that he should inherit good. To make the former impossible is to make the latter impossible. To object to the law of heredity, is to object to God's ordinance of society, and to say that God should have made men, like the angels, a company, and not a race.” The common moral characteristics of the race can only be accounted for upon the Scriptural view that “that which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6). Since propagation is a propagation of soul, as well as body, we see that to beget children under improper conditions is a crime, and that fœticide is murder. Haeckel, Evolution of Man, 2:3—“The human embryo passes through the whole course of its development in forty weeks. Each man is really older by this period than is usually assumed. When, for example, a child is said to be nine and a quarter years old, he is really ten years old.” Is this the reason why Hebrews call a child a year old at birth? President Edwards prayed for his children and his children's children to the end of time, and President Woolsey congratulated himself that he was one of the inheritors of those prayers. R. W. Emerson: “How can a man get away from his ancestors?”Men of genius should select their ancestors with great care. When begin the instruction of a child? A hundred years before he is born. A lady whose children were noisy and troublesome said to a Quaker relative that she wished she could get a good Quaker governess for them, to teach them the quiet ways of the Society of Friends. “It would not do them that service,” was the reply; “they should have been rocked in a Quaker cradle, if they were to learn Quakerly ways.”

Galton, Natural Inheritance, 104—“The child inherits partly from his parents, partly from his ancestry. In every population that intermarries freely, when the genealogy of any man is traced far backwards, his ancestry will be found to consist of such varied [pg 497]elements that they are indistinguishable from the sample taken at haphazard from the general population. Galton speaks of the tendency of peculiarities to revert to the general type, and says that a man's brother is twice as nearly related to him as his father is, and nine times as nearly as his cousin. The mean stature of any particular class of men will be the same as that of the race; in other words, it will be mediocre. This tells heavily against the full hereditary transmission of any rare and valuable gift, as only a few of the many children would resemble their parents.” We may add to these thoughts of Galton that Christ himself, as respects his merely human ancestry, was not so much son of Mary, as he was Son of man.

Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 144-167—In an investigated case, “in seven and a half generations the maximum ancestry for one person is 382, or for three persons 1146. The names of 452 of them, or nearly half, are recorded, and these 452 named ancestors are not 452 distinct persons, but only 149, many of them, in the remote generations, being common ancestors of all three in many lines. If the lines of descent from the unrecorded ancestors were interrelated in the same way, as they would surely be in an old and stable community, the total ancestry of these three persons for seven and a half generations would be 378 persons instead of 1146. The descendants of many die out. All the members of a species descend from a few ancestors in a remote generation, and these few are the common ancestors of all. Extinction of family names is very common. We must seek in the modern world and not in the remote past for an explanation of that diversity among individuals which passes under the name of variation. The genealogy of a species is not a tree, but a slender thread of very few strands, a little frayed at the near end, but of immeasurable length. A fringe of loose ends all along the thread may represent the animals which having no descendants are now as if they had never been. Each of the strands at the near end is important as a possible line of union between the thread of the past and that of the distant future.”

Weismann, Heredity, 270, 272, 380, 384, denies Brooks's theory that the male element represents the principle of variation. He finds the cause of variation in the union of elements from the two parents. Each child unites the hereditary tendencies of two parents, and so must be different from either. The third generation is a compromise between four different hereditary tendencies. Brooks finds the cause of variation in sexual reproduction, but he bases his theory upon the transmission of acquired characters. This transmission is denied by Weismann, who says that the male germ-cell does not play a different part from that of the female in the construction of the embryo. Children inherit quite as much from the father as from the mother. Like twins are derived from the same egg-cell. No two germ-cells contain exactly the same combinations of hereditary tendencies. Changes in environment and organism affect posterity, not directly, but only through other changes produced in its germinal matter. Hence efforts to reach high food cannot directly produce the giraffe. See Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution, 235-239; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems; Ribot, Heredity; Woods, Heredity in Royalty. On organic unity in connection with realism, see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1865:126-135; Dabney, Theology, 317-321.

V. The Moral Nature of Man.

By the moral nature of man we mean those powers which fit him for right or wrong action. These powers are intellect, sensibility, and will, together with that peculiar power of discrimination and impulsion, which we call conscience. In order to have moral action, man has intellect or reason, to discern the difference between right and wrong; sensibility, to be moved by each of these; free will, to do the one or the other. Intellect, sensibility, and will, are man's three faculties. But in connection with these faculties there is a sort of activity which involves them all, and without which there can be no moral action, namely, the activity of conscience. Conscience applies the moral law to particular cases in our personal experience, and proclaims that law as binding upon us. Only a rational and sentient being can be truly moral; yet it does not come within our province to treat of man's intellect or sensibility in general. We speak here only of Conscience and of Will.

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1. Conscience.

A. Conscience an accompanying knowledge.—As already intimated, conscience is not a separate faculty, like intellect, sensibility, and will, but rather a mode in which these faculties act. Like consciousness, conscience is an accompanying knowledge. Conscience is a knowing of self (including our acts and states) in connection with a moral standard, or law. Adding now the element of feeling, we may say that conscience is man's consciousness of his own moral relations, together with a peculiar feeling in view of them. It thus involves the combined action of the intellect and of the sensibility, and that in view of a certain class of objects, viz.: right and wrong.

There is no separate ethical faculty any more than there is a separate æsthetic faculty. Conscience is like taste: it has to do with moral being and relations, as taste has to do with æsthetic being and relations. But the ethical judgment and impulse are, like the æsthetic judgment and impulse, the mode in which intellect, sensibility and will act with reference to a certain class of objects. Conscience deals with the right, as taste deals with the beautiful. As consciousness (con and scio) is a con-knowing, a knowing of our thoughts, desires and volitions in connection with a knowing of the self that has these thoughts, desires and volitions; so conscience is a con-knowing, a knowing of our moral acts and states in connection with a knowing of some moral standard or law which is conceived of as our true self, and therefore as having authority over us. Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 183-185—“The condemnation of self involves self-diremption, double consciousness. Without it Kant's categorical imperative is impossible. The one self lays down the law to the other self, judges it, threatens it. This is what is meant, when the apostle says: ‘It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me’(Rom. 7:17).”

B. Conscience discriminative and impulsive.—But we need to define more narrowly both the intellectual and the emotional elements in conscience. As respects the intellectual element, we may say that conscience is a power of judgment,—it declares our acts or states to conform, or not to conform, to law; it declares the acts or states which conform to be obligatory,—those which do not conform, to be forbidden. In other words, conscience judges: (1) This is right (or, wrong); (2) I ought (or, I ought not). In connection with this latter judgment, there comes into view the emotional element of conscience,—we feel the claim of duty; there is an inner sense that the wrong must not be done. Thus conscience is (1) discriminative, and (2) impulsive.

Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 173—“The one distinctive function of conscience is that of authoritative self-judgments in the conscious presence of a supreme Personality to whom we as persons feel ourselves accountable. It is this twofold personal element in every judgment of conscience, viz., the conscious self-judgment in the presence of the all-judging Deity, which has led such writers as Bain and Spencer and Stephen to attempt the explanation of the origin and authority of conscience as the product of parental training and social environment.... Conscience is not prudential nor advisory nor executive, but solely judicial. Conscience is the moral reason, pronouncing upon moral actions. Consciousness furnishes law; conscience pronounces judgments; it says: Thou shalt, Thou shalt not. Every man must obey his conscience; if it is not enlightened, that is his look-out. The callousing of conscience in this life is already a penal infliction.” S. S. Times, Apl. 5, 1902:185—“Doing as well as we know how is not enough, unless we know just what is right and then do that. God never tells us merely to do our best, or according to our knowledge. It is our duty to know what is right, and then to do it. Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. We have responsibility for knowing preliminary to doing.”

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C. Conscience distinguished from other mental processes.—The nature and office of conscience will be still more clearly perceived if we distinguish it from other processes and operations with which it is too often confounded. The term conscience has been used by various writers to designate either one or all of the following: 1. Moral intuition—the intuitive perception of the difference between right and wrong, as opposite moral categories. 2. Accepted law—the application of the intuitive idea to general classes of actions, and the declaration that these classes of actions are right or wrong, apart from our individual relation to them. This accepted law is the complex product of (a) the intuitive idea, (b) the logical intelligence, (c) experiences of utility, (d) influences of society and education, and (e) positive divine revelation. 3. Judgment—applying this accepted law to individual and concrete cases in our own experience, and pronouncing our own acts or states either past, present, or prospective, to be right or wrong. 4. Command—authoritative declaration of obligation to do the right, or forbear the wrong, together with an impulse of the sensibility away from the one, and toward the other. 5. Remorse or approval—moral sentiments either of approbation or disapprobation, in view of past acts or states, regarded as wrong or right. 6. Fear or hope—instinctive disposition of disobedience to expect punishment, and of obedience to expect reward.

Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 70—“The feeling of the ought is primary, essential, unique; the judgments as to what one ought are the results of environment, education and reflection.” The sentiment of justice is not an inheritance of civilized man alone. No Indian was ever robbed of his lands or had his government allowance stolen from him who was not as keenly conscious of the wrong as in like circumstances we could conceive that a philosopher would be. The oughtness of the ought is certainly intuitive; the whyness of the ought (conformity to God) is possibly intuitive also; the whatness of the ought is less certainly intuitive. Cutler, Beginnings of Ethics, 163, 164—“Intuition tells us that we are obliged; why we are obliged, and what we are obliged to, we must learn elsewhere.” Obligation—that which is binding on a man; ought is something owed; duty is something due. The intuitive notion of duty (intellect) is matched by the sense of obligation (feeling).

Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203, 270—“All men have a sense of right,—of right to life, and contemporaneously perhaps, but certainly afterwards, of right to personal property. And my right implies duty in my neighbor to respect it. Then the sense of right becomes objective and impersonal. My neighbor's duty to me implies my duty to him. I put myself in his place.” Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 156, 188—“First, the feeling of obligation, the idea of a right and a wrong with corresponding duties, is universal.... Secondly, there is a very general agreement in the formal principles of action, and largely in the virtues also, such as benevolence, justice, gratitude.... Whether we owe anything to our neighbor has never been a real question. The practical trouble has always lain in the other question: Who is my neighbor? Thirdly, the specific contents of the moral ideal are not fixed, but the direction in which the ideal lies is generally discernible.... We have in ethics the same fact as in intellect—a potentially infallible standard, with manifold errors in its apprehension and application. Lucretius held that degradation and paralysis of the moral nature result from religion. Many claim on the other hand that without religion morals would disappear from the earth.”

Robinson, Princ. and Prac. of Morality, 173—“Fear of an omnipotent will is very different from remorse in view of the nature of the supreme Being whose law we have violated.” A duty is to be settled in accordance with the standard of absolute right, not as public sentiment would dictate. A man must be ready to do right in spite of what everybody thinks. Just as the decisions of a judge are for the time binding on all good citizens, so the decisions of conscience, as relatively binding, must always be obeyed. They are presumptively right and they are the only present guide of action. Yet man's present state of sin makes it quite possible that the decisions which are relatively [pg 500]right may be absolutely wrong. It is not enough to take one's time from the watch; the watch may go wrong; there is a prior duty of regulating the watch by astronomical standards. Bishop Gore: “Man's first duty is, not to follow his conscience, but to enlighten his conscience.” Lowell says that the Scythians used to eat their grandfathers out of humanity. Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300—“Nothing is so stubborn or so fanatical as a wrongly instructed conscience, as Paul showed in his own case by his own confession” (Acts 26:9—“I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth”).

D. Conscience the moral judiciary of the soul.—From what has been previously said, it is evident that only 3. and 4. are properly included under the term conscience. Conscience is the moral judiciary of the soul—the power within of judgment and command. Conscience must judge according to the law given to it, and therefore, since the moral standard accepted by the reason may be imperfect, its decisions, while relatively just, may be absolutely unjust.—1. and 2. belong to the moral reason, but not to conscience proper. Hence the duty of enlightening and cultivating the moral reason, so that conscience may have a proper standard of judgment.—5. and 6. belong to the sphere of moral sentiment, and not to conscience proper. The office of conscience is to “bear witness” (Rom. 2:15).

In Rom. 2:15—“they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them”—we have conscience clearly distinguished both from the law and the perception of law on the one hand, and from the moral sentiments of approbation and disapprobation on the other. Conscience does not furnish the law, but it bears witness with the law which is furnished by other sources. It is not “that power of mind by which moral law is discovered to each individual”(Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 77), nor can we speak of “Conscience, the Law” (as Whewell does in his Elements of Morality, 1:259-266). Conscience is not the law-book, in the court room, but it is the judge,—whose business is, not to make law, but to decide cases according to the law given to him.

As conscience is not legislative, so it is not retributive; as it is not the law-book, so it is not the sheriff. We say, indeed, in popular language, that conscience scourges or chastises, but it is only in the sense in which we say that the judge punishes,—i. e., through the sheriff. The moral sentiments are the sheriff,—they carry out the decisions of conscience, the judge; but they are not themselves conscience, any more than the sheriff is the judge.

Only this doctrine, that conscience does not discover law, can explain on the one hand the fact that men are bound to follow their consciences, and on the other hand the fact that their consciences so greatly differ as to what is right or wrong in particular cases. The truth is, that conscience is uniform and infallible, in the sense that it always decides rightly according to the law given it. Men's decisions vary, only because the moral reason has presented to the conscience different standards by which to judge.

Conscience can be educated only in the sense of acquiring greater facility and quickness in making its decisions. Education has its chief effect, not upon the conscience, but upon the moral reason, in rectifying its erroneous, or imperfect standards of judgment. Give conscience a right law by which to judge, and its decisions will be uniform, and absolutely as well as relatively just. We are bound, not only to “follow our conscience,”but to have a right conscience to follow,—and to follow it, not as one follows the beast he drives, but as the soldier follows his commander. Robert J. Burdette: “Following conscience as a guide is like following one's nose. It is important to get the nose pointed right before it is safe to follow it. A man can keep the approval of his own conscience in very much the same way that he can keep directly behind his nose, and go wrong all the time.”

Conscience is the con-knowing of a particular act or state, as coming under the law accepted by the reason as to right and wrong; and the judgment of conscience subsumes this act or state under that general standard. Conscience cannot include the law—cannot itself be the law,—because reason only knows, never con-knows. Reason says scio; only judgment says conscio.

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This view enables us to reconcile the intuitional and the empirical theories of morals. Each has its element of truth. The original sense of right and wrong is intuitive,—no education could ever impart the idea of the difference between right and wrong to one who had it not. But what classes of things are right or wrong, we learn by the exercise of our logical intelligence, in connection with experiences of utility, influences of society and tradition, and positive divine revelation. Thus our moral reason, through a combination of intuition and education, of internal and external information as to general principles of right and wrong, furnishes the standard according to which conscience may judge the particular cases which come before it.

This moral reason may become depraved by sin, so that the light becomes darkness (Mat. 6:22, 23) and conscience has only a perverse standard by which to judge. The “weak” conscience (1 Cor. 8:12) is one whose standard of judgment is yet imperfect; the conscience “branded” (Rev. Vers.) or “seared” (A. V.) “as with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2) is one whose standard has been wholly perverted by practical disobedience. The word and the Spirit of God are the chief agencies in rectifying our standards of judgment, and so of enabling conscience to make absolutely right decisions. God can so unite the soul to Christ, that it becomes partaker on the one hand of his satisfaction to justice and is thus “sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22), and on the other hand of his sanctifying power and is thus enabled in certain respects to obey God's command and to speak of a “good conscience” (1 Pet. 3:16—of single act; 3:21—of state) instead of an “evil conscience”(Heb. 10:22) or a conscience “defiled” (Tit. 1:15) by sin. Here the “good conscience” is the conscience which has been obeyed by the will, and the “evil conscience” the conscience which has been disobeyed; with the result, in the first case, of approval from the moral sentiments, and, in the second case, of disapproval.

E. Conscience in its relation to God as law-giver.—Since conscience, in the proper sense, gives uniform and infallible judgment that the right is supremely obligatory, and that the wrong must be forborne at every cost, it can be called an echo of God's voice, and an indication in man of that which his own true being requires.

Conscience has sometimes been described as the voice of God in the soul, or as the personal presence and influence of God himself. But we must not identify conscience with God. D. W. Faunce: “Conscience is not God,—it is only a part of one's self. To build up a religion about one's own conscience, as if it were God, is only a refined selfishness—a worship of one part of one's self by another part of one's self.” In The Excursion, Wordsworth speaks of conscience as “God's most intimate presence in the soul And his most perfect image in the world.” But in his Ode to Duty he more discreetly writes: “Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if that name thou love, Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring, and reprove, Thou who art victory and law When empty terrors overawe, From vain temptations dost set free And calmst the weary strife of frail humanity!” Here is an allusion to the Hebrew Bath Kol. “The Jews say that the Holy Spirit spoke during the Tabernacle by Urim and Thummim, under the first Temple by the Prophets, and under the second Temple by the Bath Kol—a divine intimation as inferior to the oracular voice proceeding from the mercy seat as a daughter is supposed to be inferior to her mother. It is also used in the sense of an approving conscience. In this case it is the echo of the voice of God in those who by obeying hear” (Hershon's Talmudic Miscellany, 2, note). This phrase, “the echo of God's voice,” is a correct description of conscience, and Wordsworth probably had it in mind when he spoke of duty as “the daughter of the voice of God.”Robert Browning describes conscience as “the great beacon-light God sets in all.... The worst man upon earth ... knows in his conscience more Of what right is, than arrives at birth In the best man's acts that we bow before.” Jackson, James Martineau, 154—The sense of obligation is “a piercing ray of the great Orb of souls.” On Wordsworth's conception of conscience, see A. H. Strong, Great Poets, 365-368.

Since the activity of the immanent God reveals itself in the normal operations of our own faculties, conscience might be also regarded as man's true self over against the false self which we have set up against it. Theodore Parker defines conscience as “our consciousness of the conscience of God.” In his fourth year, says Chadwick, his biographer (pages 12, 13, 185), young Theodore saw a little spotted tortoise and lifted his hand to strike. All at once something checked his arm, and a voice within said clear and loud: “It is wrong.” He asked his mother what it was that told him it was wrong. [pg 502]She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking him in her arms said: “Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and will always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear and disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and will leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on your hearing this little voice.” R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 87, 171—“Man has conscience, as he has talents. Conscience, no more than talent, makes him good. He is good, only as he follows conscience and uses talent.... The relation between the terms consciousness and conscience, which are in fact but forms of the same word, testifies to the fact that it is in the action of conscience that man's consciousness of himself is chiefly experienced.”

The conscience of the regenerate man may have such right standards, and its decisions may be followed by such uniformly right action, that its voice, though it is not itself God's voice, is yet the very echo of God's voice. The renewed conscience may take up into itself, and may express, the witness of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 9:1—“I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Spirit”; cf. 8:16—“the Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God”). But even when conscience judges according to imperfect standards, and is imperfectly obeyed by the will, there is a spontaneity in its utterances and a sovereignty in its commands. It declares that whatever is right must be done. The imperative of conscience is a “categorical imperative” (Kant). It is independent of the human will. Even when disobeyed, it still asserts its authority. Before conscience, every other impulse and affection of man's nature is called to bow.

F. Conscience in its relation to God as holy.—Conscience is not an original authority. It points to something higher than itself. The “authority of conscience” is simply the authority of the moral law, or rather, the authority of the personal God, of whose nature the law is but a transcript. Conscience, therefore, with its continual and supreme demand that the right should be done, furnishes the best witness to man of the existence of a personal God, and of the supremacy of holiness in him in whose image we are made.

In knowing self in connection with moral law, man not only gets his best knowledge of self, but his best knowledge of that other self opposite to him, namely, God. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 236—“The conscience is the true Jacob's ladder, set in the heart of the individual and reaching unto heaven; and upon it the angels of self-reproach and self-approval ascend and descend.” This is of course true if we confine our thoughts to the mandatory element in revelation. There is a higher knowledge of God which is given only in grace. Jacob's ladder symbolizes the Christ who publishes not only the gospel but the law, and not only the law but the gospel. Dewey, Psychology, 344—“Conscience is intuitive, not in the sense that it enunciates universal laws and principles, for it lays down no laws. Conscience is a name for the experience of personality that any given act is in harmony or in discord with a truly realized personality.”Because obedience to the dictates of conscience is always relatively right, Kant could say that “an erring conscience is a chimæra.” But because the law accepted by conscience may be absolutely wrong, conscience may in its decisions greatly err from the truth. S. S. Times: “Saul before his conversion was a conscientious wrong doer. His spirit and character was commendable, while his conduct was reprehensible.” We prefer to say that Saul's zeal for the law was a zeal to make the law subservient to his own pride and honor.

Horace Bushnell said that the first requirement of a great ministry is a great conscience. He did not mean the punitive, inhibitory conscience merely, but rather the discovering, arousing, inspiring conscience, that sees at once the great things to be done, and moves toward them with a shout and a song. This unbiased and pure conscience is inseparable from the sense of its relation to God and to God's holiness. Shakespeare, Henry VI, 2d Part, 3:2—“What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; And he but naked, though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.” Huxley, in his lecture at Oxford in 1893, admits and even insists that ethical practice must be and should be in opposition to evolution; that the methods of evolution do not account for ethical man and his ethical progress. Morality is not a product of the same methods by which [pg 503]lower orders have advanced in perfection of organization, namely, by the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Human progress is moral, is in freedom, is under the law of love, is different in kind from physical evolution. James Russell Lowell: “In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing: The ten commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.”

R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 161—“Conscience lives in human nature like a rightful king, whose claim can never be forgotten by his people, even though they dethrone and misuse him, and whose presence on the seat of judgment can alone make the nation to be at peace with itself.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 424—“The Kantian theory of autonomy does not tell the whole story of the moral life. Its unyielding Ought, its categorical Imperative, issues not merely from the depths of our own nature, but from the heart of the universe itself. We are self-legislative; but we reënact the law already enacted by God; we recognize, rather than constitute, the law of our own being. The moral law is an echo, within our own souls, of the voice of the Eternal, ‘whose offspring we are’ (Acts 17:28).”

Schenkel, Christliche Dogmatik, 1:135-155—“The conscience is the organ by which the human spirit finds God in itself and so becomes aware of itself in him. Only in conscience is man conscious of himself as eternal, as distinct from God, yet as normally bound to be determined wholly by God. When we subject ourselves wholly to God, conscience gives us peace. When we surrender to the world the allegiance due only to God, conscience brings remorse. In this latter case we become aware that while God is in us, we are no longer in God. Religion is exchanged for ethics, the relation of communion for the relation of separation. In conscience alone man distinguishes himself absolutely from the brute. Man does not make conscience, but conscience makes man. Conscience feels every separation from God as an injury to self. Faith is the relating of the self-consciousness to the God-consciousness, the becoming sure of our own personality, in the absolute personality of God. Only in faith does conscience come to itself. But by sin this faith-consciousness may be turned into law-consciousness. Faith affirms God in us; Law affirms God outside of us.” Schenkel differs from Schleiermacher in holding that religion is not feeling but conscience, and that it is not a sense of dependence on the world, but a sense of dependence on God. Conscience recognizes a God distinct from the universe, a moral God, and so makes an unmoral religion impossible.

Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 283-285, Moral Science, 49, Law of Love, 41—“Conscience is the moral consciousness of man in view of his own actions as related to moral law. It is a double knowledge of self and of the law. Conscience is not the whole of the moral nature. It presupposes the moral reason, which recognizes the moral law and affirms its universal obligation for all moral beings. It is the office of conscience to bring man into personal relation to this law. It sets up a tribunal within him by which his own actions are judged. Not conscience, but the moral reason, judges of the conduct of others. This last is science, but not conscience.”

Peabody, Moral Philos., 41-60—“Conscience not a source, but a means, of knowledge. Analogous to consciousness. A judicial faculty. Judges according to the law before it. Verdict (verum dictum) always relatively right, although, by the absolute standard of right, it may be wrong. Like all perceptive faculties, educated by use (not by increase of knowledge only, for man may act worse, the more knowledge he has). For absolutely right decisions, conscience is dependent upon knowledge. To recognize conscience as legislator (as well as judge), is to fail to recognize any objective standard of right.” The Two Consciences, 46, 47—“Conscience the Law, and Conscience the Witness. The latter is the true and proper Conscience.”

H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theology, 178-191—“The unity of conscience is not in its being one faculty or in its performing one function, but in its having one object, its relation to one idea, viz., right.... The term ‘conscience’ no more designates a special faculty than the term ‘religion’ does (or than the ‘æsthetic sense’).... The existence of conscience proves a moral law above us; it leads logically to a Moral Governor; ... it implies an essential distinction between right and wrong, an immutable morality; ... yet needs to be enlightened; ... men may be conscientious in iniquity; ... conscience is not righteousness; ... this may only show the greatness of the depravity, having conscience, and yet ever disobeying it.”

On the New Testament passages with regard to conscience, see Hofmann, Lehre von dem Gewissen, 30-38; Kähler, Das Gewissen, 225-293. For the view that conscience is primarily the cognitive or intuitional power of the soul, see Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 77; Alexander, Moral Science, 20; McCosh, Div. Govt., 297-312; Talbot, Ethical [pg 504]Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257-274; Park, Discourses, 260-296; Whewell, Elements of Morality, 1:259-266. On the whole subject of conscience, see Mansel, Metaphysics, 158-170; Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 45—“The discovery of duty is as distinctly relative to an objective Righteousness as the perception of form to an external space”; also Types, 2:27-30—“We first judge ourselves; then others”; 53, 54, 74, 103—“Subjective morals are as absurd as subjective mathematics.” The best brief treatment of the whole subject is that of E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 26-78. See also Wayland, Moral Science, 49; Harless, Christian Ethics, 45, 60; H. N. Day, Science of Ethics, 17; Janet, Theory of Morals, 264, 348; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 62; cf. Schwegler, Hist. Philosophy, 233; Haven, Mor. Philos., 41; Fairchild, Mor. Philos., 75; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 71; Passavant, Das Gewissen; Wm. Schmid, Das Gewissen.

2. Will.

A. Will defined.—Will is the soul's power to choose between motives and to direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in other words, the soul's power to choose both an end and the means to attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the choice of means we call executive volition.

In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive, i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives, i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says: “Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.” Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.

For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.” For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.

James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.” 2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason, per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.” 549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.” 562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.” 567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.” 568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality; [pg 505]but we also say: ‘Let it be a reality.’ ” 571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer, No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.” 584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as an epiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.” Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.

B. Will and other faculties.—(a) We accept the threefold division of human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (b) Intellect is the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections); will is the soul choosing (end or means). (c) In every act of the soul, all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (d) Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before willing. (e) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of these is possible without willing.

Socrates to Theætetus: “It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.” 364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.” 411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.” Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”

As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt: “Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.” There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate: “The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.” Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have no science; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have no art; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have no morality. Ælfric, A. D. 900: “The verb ‘to will’ has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”