Pythagoras, 582 B. C., used as the base of his arguments transmigration of the soul. One of his expressions was: "The soul is a harmony chained to the body."
Socrates: "Design proves that existence is God."
Aristotle: "Thinking or thought is God Theology—Soul always thinking is immortal."
Thus I might quote from deep thinkers from Zoroaster down to our times. If one feels disposed to study the works of those self-styled liberal exponders from Spinoza to James, they will find their arguments running essentially in the same groove, virtually this: Animals, including men, are not possessed by an invisible guide. That something which discerns between right and wrong and dictates to the body whether it should follow the path of desire or virtue, they absolutely ignore. Because they cannot comprehend the mysteries of the soul, they dwell upon and cling to tangible material effects, actually assuming effect without cause. They disallow that the good Samaritan and the Levite had exactly the same exterior stimuli. They are like the woman at Jacob's well, who could comprehend the well and mountain, but could not comprehend the invisible spring. She awoke when told how her secrets were known, but they awake not, as the result of intention.
James makes a feeble attempt to prove that matter thinks when he says: "Every individual cell has its own consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about—associated by brain paths."
What profound reasoning; think of it. Betts tells us that there are three thousand million cells, or neurons, in an adult nervous system; then think of the paths leading from one cell to the other. We learn that light, or electricity, would travel around our world eight times in one second; I wonder, if at the same rate of speed, how long it would take an exterior stimulus to cover the distance over one of his brain paths, from cell to cell.
"Oh," but one says, "Richardson, you do not understand James." Allowed, but if a man of my experience does not understand materialism, how is a youth of twenty years expected to understand it?
Man cannot explain memory, but he knows it is the principle in the ego, or soul. To illustrate: In a crowd I overhear a voice. I say to the talker, "I recognize your voice, but I cannot place you." "Think again," he says. Now, I start back over life's trail, listening to voices, one-two-twenty-forty years, then I say, "your name is Edwin Pease." "Yes," he says, "we were boys together fifty years ago."
Did this familiar voice, the true External Stimulus, awaken something which existed, or did it create something in my brain?