RESEARCH IX. ON THE POWER TO GO BEYOND OURSELVES. "And shall I find no Father? Shall my being "Nay; my soul spurns it! Less it is to know "But theirs, who marking out the bounds of mind, "A land which is, though fainter than a cloud,' LEWIS MORRIS, Songs of Two Worlds, p. 84. It seems a truism, "that like things, in the like circumstances, will act alike;" but if this, which seems so true, were altogether true, the worlds would never have become what they are. The present condition of the earth is proof that like, in like circumstances, produced the unlike. In very ancient ages, there was no life in the earth, and the dead became living; the living had no instinct, and instinct was added; afterwards, to instinct was given intelligence; and to intelligence, emotion. Things were advanced beyond themselves. The departure from uniformity was by a sort of free operation. Was this sort of free operation by automatic action? We are told that the universe and all in it, plants, lower animals, higher animals, and men, are mere machines; and that our thought, will, emotion, are produced by unconscious physico-chemical energies.1 There are who say, "A moving molecule of inorganic matter possesses a small piece of mind-stuff." Descartes affirmed it of the brutes. Some men, in our own days, to get rid of responsibility as to their freedom, accept the Pythagorean statement-"Number is the essential fact and principle of all things ;" and pleasantly enough, with a musical philosopher, declare, “The soul is a species of harmony." Even if so, men and things did, in time past, go beyond themselves; for things became other things, unlike themselves; plants, animals, men, changed and changed again; and into men came a harmony which had no pre-existence. There was a surpassing process. "Sleepe after toyle, Porte after stormie seas, Death after life, Doth greatly please.” Faerie Queene. Taking all in all, the changes and grandeur of the past; the greater and lesser spaces, distances and splen 1 Stated in La Mettrie's "L'Homme Machine;" by Nägeli, Nature, October 4, 1877; Report of the Munich Congress of the German Association; by Lange, "History of Materialism." dours of the stars; corresponding distinctions and differences in the Earth, as it is now, warrant a firm conviction that things pass from lower to higher stages. Neither we, nor Nature, have done all that there is to do. Looking at things with more insight than we had in the past, we shall find that the whole world and ourselves are literally built up by influences that know neither measure nor end, that lurk in a thousand disguises. If continuous, they are like the atmosphere -the same, yet not the same; if successive, they are as the waters of the sparkling spring; some of the natural traces are grand as the stars above; others crowd around us "like truths of science waiting to be caught." Men of culture have not only an enthusiasm for beauty in form and colour, a delight in melodious sounds, in sweet odours; they would attain a higher beauty, a better state; not in wild delusive effort, as of the moth for the lamp; but by a sort of prescience, as to some perennial existence. Joy and sorrow are not generally through consciousness of any present excess; but by a sense of something supernal which, as yet, they are unable to grasp. The cold dull man, dwarfed by the pettiness of small house-life, and useless observances not productive of thought, even he will awake sometimes to regret wasted gifts and long-lost hopes. These various powers by which, after Divine Fiat, as Scripture says, the earth and waters bring forth of themselves; and the things brought forth transcend themselves, by passing on and becoming higher organisms, as the true view of evolution shows; indicate that the force, or power of doing work in nature, is something more than those forces which science shows are being so lowered by diffusion, that the entire universe of matter will fall into a state of everlasting rest. These forces, as they cannot prevent the passing away of existing nature, certainly could not have originated it. The great Energy, the all-originative and self-sufficient, is the Unknown Eternal who acts in all, by all, through all, in a way beyond our knowledge; and, yet, so in accord with our knowledge, as to be the correlate of all the work done, and of all the forces known. In this great truth Religion and Science coalesce: man's knowledge is not the greatest, nor man's life the highest: they are a streamlet from the Power, Wisdom, Goodness, of the Eternal. We cannot draw a line and say, "Here knowledge ceases;" there is knowledge beyond, and there are things beyond to be known. Our physical vision fails with the horizon, where the finite melts into the infinite; but, as we advance our point of view, we penetrate and know more of that infinite; view transcends view; we go beyond our former vision; pass from the lowest elements to the loftiest heights of power and intelligence. The atoms and molecules are wonderful little machines, they minister to life, or take away, but know not, nor are glad. Plants and lower animals have little or no power to discern the results of their acts. Some men, idiots, are lower than the animals; some men are dull of intellect, narrow in sympathy; but as the less good beasts have relatives of higher degree, so men do not take vast pains to show that they are beasts, but endeavour to rise in ability, acquire dominion over nature, send forth their thoughts to observe order and unity throughout the universe; and as they observe something in blind forces that is not blind, and in undiscerning elements something that is discerning, they seek for some good and mighty Will. Such a Will accounts for all those arrangements which comprise the order of the worlds; is the source of prodigies; and accounts for atoms of potency, precious corn, fruit trees, sheep, and oxen. These various powers, by which things and men advance, come from the invisible into the visible. Life is from antecedent life, thought from other thought, and spiritual states and Christlike deeds are from the Father of Christ. Further, whatever ranks as true in the spirit. must have embodiment in the external; hence creeds, formularies, are symbols of an inner faith; and our life lived in the flesh, by faith in the Son of God, becomes so transformed that it is the life of Christ, the Son of God (Gal. ii. 20). He dwells in us, and by His Life we exceed our present life and live for ever (John xiv. 23). We conclude that the universe is a vast reservoir of energy, and that every atom draws drafts on that energy. Man, an organic atom, of higher and more. manifold powers, works; feels that he works; and follows knowledge, even beyond the utmost bound of human thought. He is not a machine, like a watch, wound up for a certain time to do some peculiar things. He can stop, run himself down slowly or quickly, and rewind himself. He can moderate or intensify the springs and weights of action, graduate the body by the mind, and the mind by the body. Strenuously call up strength and use it, so that Saul the persecutor becomes, by Divine Grace, Paul the Apostle; Luther, the monk, becomes Luther the Reformer; and all the |