materialists is to conciliate the personal identity of the mind with the perpetual mutability of the organized body. Now we must admit that materialists have not taken much pains to solve this problem, and Dr. Büchner does not even mention it. It does not depend upon him, however, that the identic should result from change, or unity from composition. If that is so, it must still be explained how it can be. The first explanation which might be given, is that indicated in the passage from Cuvier cited above. The vital whirlpool, it is said, has a constant direction; in the change of matter, there is always something left, form. The materials are displaced and replaced, but always in the same order and in the same relations. Thus the features of the face remain ever nearly the same, despite the change of the parts; the scar always remains, though the wounded particles have long ago disappeared. The living body has a historic oneness, which results from che persistence of relations, and which is the foundation of the identity of the I.

Such an explanation, however, can only satisfy those who do not take good account of the conditions of the problem, for in supposing that we may explain this fixity of the type, whether individual or generic, by a simple play of matter, by chemical or mechanical action, it must not be forgotten that an identity so produced will ever be only an apparent and wholly external identity, like that of those petrifactions in which vegetable molecules have been gradually replaced by mineral molecules, without the form of the object's experiencing any change. I say that such an object is not really identical, and especially that it is not so to itself, and that in such a theory you will find no foundation for the consciousness and the memory of identity, for I demand, where will you place memory in this ever-moving object? Shall it be in the elements, in the molecules themselves? But as they disappear, those which enter cannot remember those that depart. Shall it be in the relation of the particles? It must be, for that is the only thing that truly continues; but what is a relation which itself thinks, remembers, and is responsible? These are so many unintelligible abstractions to which our readers are welcome.

One might turn to the following hypothesis. It might be said: In proportion as the molecules enter into the body, for

instance into the brain, they place themselves where the preceding ones were; there they are found in the same relation with the neighboring particles, they are drawn into the same vortex as those they replace. Ah well? so, by hypothesis, thought is a vibration of the cerebral fibers; since to-day everything is explained by vibrations, each new molecule will come in its turn to vibrate exactly as the preceding; it will give the same note, and you will believe you hear the same sound; this then will be the same thought, though the molecule has changed. Having the same thought, the man will be the same individual. Such an explanation, however, is nowise satisfactory, for identity of persons is not attached to identity of thoughts. I may vacillate between the most opposite ideas and feelings without ceasing to be myself; two men thinking of the same thing at once, the series of numbers for example, will not therefore become one and the same man; several cords emitting the same sound are not one cord. Thus identity of vibrations, no more than persistence in form, explains the consciousness of personal identity.

It may be rejoined: You reason upon a false theory. You seem to believe that the human brain totally changes from moment to moment, from second to second. This is not so; the brain only changes in succession. On the other hand is the I then immobile? Does it not change also from moment to moment? Is the youth the same as the mature man, the mature as the aged man? So neither is change absolute in the body, nor immobility in the soul. Could we not come into harmony? The consciousness of identity in us would correspond to the durable part of the brain, the consciousness of change to the changing part. So that, in man, would be united, according to the expression of Plato, the one and the many, the same and another. That is, I think, the profoundest thing that can be said in favor of materialism; but I do not believe it has ever taken the trouble to go so far in its defense: we take pains to furnish it with arms. However that may be, this last turn no more satisfies me than the preceding. At the outset it is something strange that man should every moment lose a part of himself, and that he should recomplete himself every moment. At the end of a certain time I should have but three fourths of myself, then a half, then a fourth,

then nothing. Is that a faithful picture of what we experience when we feel ourselves change? Phenomena change, but we attribute them always to the same individual; there are variations in the consciousness of this permanent I, overturnings, revolutions, a thousand accidents, but the being continues and recovers itself always after faintings, excitements, and troubles of every kind to which it is a prey.

And, moreover, these organic changes, though working more slowly, none the less produce in the end the same effects. After some years, a new I would have succeeded the preceding. Let us suppose the renewal to occur four times, corresponding to the four ages of life: there will then be an infant I, a youthful I, a mature I, an aged I! But these are four different men, who somehow are heirs one of another. How are they united to form one, and one possessing himself, and having a consciousness and memory of his identity? Still that will be only an apparent identity, like that of a public function filled successively by men following the same routine as their predecessors, but at bottom different from them. I grow weary of following out frivolous and subtile consequences which are repugnant to good sense.

After this exposition and discussion of the new German doctrines, it only remains to ask what scientific cause can explain this relapse to materialism already so striking in Germany, and whose advance is so startling among ourselves. Shall we say with Dr. Büchner that the cause is a return to experience, and the observation of facts, in a word, to the true scientific method? No, doubtless, for immediate experiment pronounces nothing upon materialism; it is not for it to sound first principles; and to affirm materialism, we must employ reasoning, hypothesis, and induction at least quite as much as in the contrary theory. No, what explains materialism is a tendency natural to the human soul, and one that to-day is very potent over men's minds: the tendency to unity. We wish to explain everything by a single law, a single phenomenon, a single cause. This is no doubt a useful and necessary tendency, without which there would be no science; but of how many errors has it not been the cause! How many imaginary analogies, how many capital omissions, how many chimerical creations, has a love of vain simplicity produced in philosophy!

Who can deny without any. doubt that unity is at the very bottom of things, at the beginning and at the end? Who can deny that the same harmony governs the visible and the invisible world, bodies and minds? But who tells us that the harmonies, the analogies, which unite the two worlds, belong to those which we can imagine? Upon what do we found to force nature to nothing but an eternal repetition of herself, and as Diderot says, the same phenomenon indefinitely diversified? Illusion and pride! Things have greater deeps than our minds possess. Doubtless matter and mind must have a common cause in the thought of God; there we should seek their ultimate unity, but what eye has penetrated them? Who can think that he has been enabled to explain this common origin of every created thing? Who could do this, save He who is the cause of all? But especially what weakness and what ignorance to limit the real existence of things to those fugitive appearances which our senses grasp, to make our imagination the measure of all things, and to adore, like the new materialists, not even the atom which had, at least, some appearance of solidity, but an inexpressible somewhat that has no name in any tongue, and which we might call infinite dust!

ART. III.—CREATION A SERIES OF SUPERNATURAL GROWTHS.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.-GENESIS ii, 7.

No objection need be taken to this rendering in respect to verbal accuracy. Any attempt at a stricter conformity to the original would only have given it a stiff and pedantic appearance, without yielding any clearer understanding of the general idea. Of this general idea we may say that while it is the same, essentially, for all minds, the conception accompanying may vary indefinitely, in manner and extent, for different intelligences. Perhaps it is not too much to say that since it was first put upon record, hardly any two readers have had precisely the same conceptual image of the great fact

it

announced, and yet all have received the same truth, and the truth, too, which the divine Author of the passage intended it should convey. This distinction between the idea and the conception, between the truth and the image under which it is conveyed, is not a vain one. It is an essential distinction we must be ever ready to make in all efforts to interpret the language of men to each other, much more the language of God to man. In most cases there may be no urgent need for making it. No question is affected by it. We take the thought, each of us, in our own way; and it is the same thought, we say again, although the way of conceiving be very different for different minds.

"Our Father who art in heaven!" Among the millions who have repeated these words how varying the imagery accompanying the great idea. It is very possible for men to say the pater noster without having anything in the mind at all. There may have been neither idea nor conception. To others there may have been presented the image of a vast and lofty abode in the sky immediately above us. The word heavens (the plural, it should be remembered, in Hebrew, and so transferred to the New Testament Greek) may have had to different minds immensely varying degrees of number and of altitude. With others, all such conceptions have vanished. It is simply the thought of something above us. In another mental stage this too departs. The mind has become too scientific to think of God or his divine abode as any more in the one direction than in the other; or if it hold to some locality as matter of fact, the conception of it is severed as much as possible from any relative images of up and down that come from the constantly changing position of our own place in the universe. "He is the Father of lights, to whom there is no parallax,” (πapaλλayn.) And yet Newton and the newly-converted Australian may each have uttered the words of this invocation with the same simple reverence of feeling and idea. They have each had in their souls the same two truths, that suggested by the words "our Father," and the fact expressed by the phrase "in the heavens." The latter words are not surplusage, notwithstanding this great diversity of conception attending them. It is a divine paternity, and that paternity unearthly, reigning throughout all that is comprehended or