One of the most important differences between human and animal consciousness comes to light in the appearance of “meaning” which is a differentiating characteristic of personal consciousness. We pass “a great divide” when we pass from bare sensory experience, common to all higher animals, to consciousness of “meaning,” which is a trait common only to persons. We all know what it is to hear words which make a clear impression and which yet arouse no “meaning.” We often gaze at objects and yet, like Macbeth, have “no speculation in our eyes”—we apprehend no significant “meaning” in the thing upon which we are looking. We sometimes catch ourselves in the very act of passing from mere sense or bare image to the higher level of “meaning.” While we gaze or while we listen we suddenly feel the “meaning” flood in and transform the whole content of consciousness. All the higher ranges of experience depend on this unique feature which is something over and above the mere sensory stage. The words, “the quality of mercy is not strain’d” remain just word-sounds until in a flash one sees that mercy is “not something that comes out grudgingly in drops,” and then the mind rises to “a consciousness of meaning.”[12] In this higher experience, “meaning” stands vividly in the focus of consciousness and, in a case, for instance, of grasping a long sentence, or of appreciating a piece of music, consciousness of “meaning” is an integral unitary whole. Now there is no corresponding unitary whole in the brain which could stand as the physical correlate to this consciousness of “meaning.” The simple sensational experiences correspond in some way to parallel brain processes but these elemental experiences are merely cues which evoke higher forms of psychical “meaning,” that have no physical or mechanical correlate in the brain.
This is still more strikingly the case in the higher forms of memory. The lower and more mechanical forms of memory may be treated as a habit-sequence, linked up with permanent brain paths. But memory proper depends, as does “meaning,” upon a single act of mental apprehension. As McDougall well says: “the whole process and effect, the apprehension and the retention and the remembering, are absolutely unique and distinct from all other apprehensions and retentions and rememberings.”[13] The higher kind of memory involves “meaning” and, the moment “meaning” floods in, vast and complicated wholes of experience tend to become a permanent possession, while only with multitudinous repetitions can we fix and keep processes that are meaningless and without psychical significance. But here once more this higher unitary consciousness of a remembered whole of experience has no assignable physical correlate in the brain-processes. Certain sensory cues evoke or recall a synthetic whole of consciousness which has no parallel in the material world.
Still more obviously in the higher æsthetic sentiments and volitional processes is there a spiritual activity which transcends the mechanical and physical order. Æsthetic joy depends upon a spiritual power to combine many elements of experience to form an object of a higher order than any object given to sense. It is particularly true of the highest æsthetic joy, for example, enjoyment of poetic creations where the ideal and intellectual element vastly overtops the sensuous, and where the words and imagery really carry the reader on into another world than the one of sight and sound. Here in a very high degree we attain a unified whole of consciousness that has no physical correlate among the brain-processes. It is further apparent that the higher forms of pleasure somehow exert an effective influence upon the physical system itself as though some new and heightening energy poured back from consciousness into the cerebral processes and drained down through the system. William James has given a very successful account of the way in which pleasure and pain as spiritual energies reinforce or damp the physical activities, so that the personal soul seems to take a unique part from within in determining the physical process. Here are his words:
“Tremendous as the part is which pleasure and pain play in our psychic life, we must confess that absolutely nothing is known of their cerebral conditions. It is hard to imagine them as having special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar forms of process in each and every centre, to which these feelings may be due. And let one try as one will to represent the cerebral activity in exclusively mechanical terms, I, for one, find it quite impossible to enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet to make no mention of the psychic side which they possess. However it be with other drainage currents and discharges, the drainage currents and discharges of the brain are not purely physical facts. They are psycho-physical facts, and the spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant of their mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical activities in a cell, as they increase, give pleasure, they seem to increase all the more rapidly for that fact; if they give displeasure, the displeasure seems to damp the activities. The psychic side of the phenomenon thus seems somewhat like the applause or hissing at a spectacle, to be an encouraging or adverse comment on what the machinery brings forth.”[14]
The unifying effect and the dynamic quality of a persistent resolution of will is another case in point which seems to show that the psychical reality in us vastly overtops the mechanism through which it works. A fixed purpose, a moral ideal, a determined intention, work far-reaching results and in some way organize and reinforce the entire nervous mechanism. The whole phenomenon of attention which has a primary importance for decisions of will and immense bearing on the problem of freedom of will is something which cannot be worked out in brain-terms. There seems to be some unifying central psychical core within us that raises us out of the level of mechanism and makes us autonomous creative beings. Once more I quote William James, whom many of us of this generation revere both as teacher and friend:
“It often takes effort to keep the mind upon an object. We feel that we can make more or less of effort as we choose. If this feeling be not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result. Though it introduce no new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away. The delay thus gained might not be more than a second in duration—but that second may be critical; for in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind, where two associated systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or less of attention at the outset, whether one system shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the other. When developed, it may make us act; and that act may seal our doom. The whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas receive. But the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. This appearance, which makes life and history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not be an illusion. Effort may be an original force and not a mere effect, and it may be indeterminate in amount.”[15]
There are thus a number of modes of consciousness, and I have mentioned only a few of them, which have no traceable counterpart in the physical sphere, and which presuppose a spiritual reality at the center of our personal life, and this spiritual reality, as we have seen, can trace its origin only to a self-existing, self-explanatory, environing consciousness, sufficiently personal to be the source of our developing personality. If this view is correct and sound, there is no scientific argument against the continuation of life after death. If personality is fundamentally a spiritual affair and the body is only a medium and organ here in space and time of a psychical reality, there are good grounds and solid hopes of permanent conservation.
But after all the supreme evidence that the universe is fundamentally spiritual is found in the revelation of personal life where it has appeared at its highest and best in history, that is in Jesus Christ. In Him we have a master manifestation of that creative upward tendency of life, a surprising mutation, which in a unique way brought into history an unpredictable inrush of life’s higher forces. The central fact which concerns us here is that He is the revealing organ of a new and higher order of life. We cannot appropriate the gospel by reducing it to a doctrine, nor by crystallizing it into an institution, nor by postponing its prophesies of moral achievement to some remote world beyond the stars. We can appropriate it only when we realize that this Christ is a revelation here in time and mutability of the eternal nature and character of that conscious personal Spirit that environs all life and that steers the entire system of things, and that He has come to bring us all into an abundant life like His own. Here in Him the love-principle which was heralded all through the long, slow process has come into full sight and into full operation as the way of life. He shows us the meaning and possibility of genuine spiritual life. He makes us sure that His kind of life is divine, and that in His face we are seeing the heart and mind and will of God. Here at least is one place in our mysterious world where love breaks through—the love that will not let go, the love that suffers long and is kind. He makes the eternal Father’s love visible and vocal in a life near enough to our own to move us with its appeal and enough beyond us to be forever our spiritual goal. We have here revealed a divine-human life which we can even now in some measure live and in which we can find our peace and joy, and through which we can so enter into relation with God that life becomes a radiant thing, as it was with Him, and death becomes, as with Him, a way of going to the Father.