Note 30 — Chapter VI · MORAL AGENCY.

Materialistic evolution, which holds matter as being the energy and cause of all things, leaves no place for free-will, because in truth it leaves no place for mind. For "mind" or "soul" as a real entity or being which thinks, feels and wills, it substitutes mere "mentality" as an effect of atomic or molecular changes in the brain. "Mind," as a self-conscious spirit that itself self-knowingly acts, is repudiated. Nothing is left but a series of sensations, thoughts and wishes that are as truly physically-produced effects as are the varied perfumes of flowers, the fall of rain or the waves of the sea. No selfhood remains in man but the physical organism which, in material causation, gives out the various forms of products or manifestations denominated "mental." But this materialistic theory is not science. It not only stands contradicted by the common judgment of mankind in all ages, but breaks down utterly in the presence of scientific psychology. For this finds among its unquestionable and irreducible facts a real self-conscious subject or self back of the series of thoughts, emotions and volitions, holding all these psychical experiences in its unitary consciousness, and, with its memories of the past, carrying its personal identity through present activity on into the future. The series of mental experiences, in the theory, are independent of each other and dependent only on the brain changes which directly produce them, and thus, by necessity, ignorant of each other. Personal identity, therefore, is full disproof of the theory. For personal identity rests in a single abiding consciousness, in which all separate mental acts are known as its own acts, the materials for memory and comparison. The truth is, that all moral distinctions arise out of the conviction that each individual, in the center of his personality, is a soul, itself determining its rational choices and responsible for the conduct of life.