The Creation of God

by Jacob Hartmann

It is brain function, brain culture, brain education, that produces greater or lesser minds, that evolves from mere intelligence the highest intellectual powers, that marks the difference between man and man from the meanest savage to the greatest philosopher and scientist.

Brain may exercise will power without training, culture, or education. The muscles may exercise strength without training, culture, or education. It is the systematic attention of the one as of the other, the frequent repetition, steady practice, that produces skill in the one, as in the other; it is the patient application and perseverance in the one as in the other, sustained by constitutional endurance, that makes the expert in the one as well as in the other.

It is the united forces of the master tissues that have produced all that is and was, and will continue to produce all that ever will be.

Soul is the product of the imagination. It has no immortality, because it has no existence.

There are a class of men that are interested in sustaining the delusion; these are the priesthood.

What we want is not the salvation of souls, but the salvation of man.

If soul is the collective name of brain product, or combined result of brain function and education, we need not disagree about the word. But if it is insisted upon that the word soul means something distinct and apart from the animal body, a supernatural manifestation, a supernatural gift or endowment, given to man at birth and to man only, and that this piece of supposed God enters the body at some period during birth and quits the body at death, it is not true! On the contrary, it is false. Man has no soul, nor has any other animal, except that power that is produced by the nervous material. The brain has a function to perform, like every other tissue in the body. The muscular tissue, the liver tissue, etc., each perform their function. The great nervous centers and the special senses, being intimately connected, carry all impressions direct to the brain; the retention of impressions, the memorizing, the recollection, the formation of ideas, of thought, imagination, are the immediate functions of the nervous substance. These are secreted in a similar manner as the pancreas secretes pancreatin; with this distinction, that pancreatin is a fluid, while the quality of nerve function is a force, a power, a manifestation, or phenomenon if you choose. Electricity is a product of a similar nature. There are other forces of a nature similar in character, the result of chemical combinations.

Let the blood be overcharged with carbonic acid and circulate in the brain, the nerve tissue will at first act irregularly, next very erratically, and finally stop its function altogether. The function of the brain is partially suspended in certain diseases, as in hysteria, epilepsy, and chorea or convulsions. And where there is no brain, or little brain, there is no function or very little function. The variety of brain, with its inequality of size, quantity, quality, the hereditary failings, opportunity, training, education, all, and much more, make up the sum total of mind. As you educate the brain, so the mind will be. It will exhibit energy and endurance, and perform its functions, in proportion as the nervous structure is healthy, the chemical constituents evenly balanced, and the equilibrium of all the organs and tissues of the body evenly and smoothly maintained, so that the molecular and chemical or vital and nervous elements of the brain perform each and every one its proper office.

There is no immortality of the soul, nor is there such a thing as death of instinct. There is nothing immortal except the elementary substances, proper; they cannot be destroyed. All live bodies function, no matter how small or how simple; complex bodies also function, and each and every organ that enters into the composition performs its function.

Every phase, every phenomenon, is a manifestation of matter. Thunderstorm, lightning, electricity, or thought—whatsoever it may be, call it by any other name, designate it or describe it how you will, we cannot separate any object from this terrestrial globe of matter. The elements composing this world gave birth to life, life manifests its energies in many forms, then returns again to the great ocean of elements whence it came.