Suggestion by analogy, feeble as it is, is the nearest approach that we can make to the solution of what must, perhaps, remain for ever a splendid mystery.
If creation be, then, the expression of the mind and will of a Creator, uttered in method and issuing in phenomena, he must see the end from the beginning: his resource is infinite. The human mathematician, of the highest order, can devise, with all the adaptations and prearrangements that are needed, an instrument or machine, which shall continue for a number of motions, without necessary limit, according to a primal law, but which by such prevised and preordered arrangements would, suddenly, at the required point of time, undergo change, and operate henceforth after a law entirely new.
An instrument has actually been made which was competent to effect the solution of quadratic equations whose roots are real. One has also been made capable of effecting the determination of the real roots of any equation. It is perfectly conceivable that an instrument could be made which should go on finding the real roots only, for a measured time, and then by a prearranged and provided method should suddenly, by the very laws and principles of its construction, so change, that for another period, or for evermore, it should also determine the imaginary roots.
Is it not conceivable that infinite resource, infinite wisdom, infinite prevision and power could in a manner which this illustration only suggests have caused the non-vital universe to become in some parts vital? Could not infinite power, infinite wisdom, the originator of all that we call material phenomena, have prevised and preordered, in the impenetrable mystery of ‘the beginning,’ that the creative laws of evolution for an inorganic world, should, as they brought about the completion of their perfect purpose, have carried with them from that ‘beginning’ preordered potentialities, that should, by the primal volition of the Creator, emerge, as an inevitable and orderly sequence, into the operation of higher activities and new laws?
If that may not be, it is not a divine being that is in our thought. But if that may be, then the self-acting laws of nature are self-acting, as the products of eternal mind and will. Each self-acting phenomenon is, to us, an embodied thought of God; emerging in matter now, as a consequence of the sublimity and perfection of the methods divinely willed ‘in the beginning.’
Let this illustration weigh for what it will; this at least is clear, that the mechanical philosophy, whether or not it refuses to be called ‘material,’ has proved its formula incompetent. Atomic matter without property, affected by motion, with persistent relations between the matter and the motion, can no more account for the universe even up to the point of the origin of the lowest life, than the vibrations of a musical chord can account for the joy begotten of music.
But how stands the problem of its origin, when, in that which lives, we include the presence of mind? None more firmly contends for the absolute disparity, the entire and unqualified difference between mind and matter, than Mr. Spencer. To him there can be nothing within the whole realm of thought severed by a wider interval than consciousness and thought on the one hand, and matter on the other. ‘Just,’ he says, ‘in the same way that the object is the unknown permanent nexus which is never itself a phenomenon, but is that which holds phenomena together, so is the subject the unknown permanent nexus which is never itself a state of consciousness, but which holds all states of consciousness together.’[22] Mind and matter, then, are here admitted to be infinitely unlike, but absolutely equal realities. This is boldly reaffirmed; he says: ‘No effort of imagination enables us to think of a shock, however minute, except as undergone by an entity. We are compelled, therefore, to postulate a substance of mind that is affected, before we can think of its affections.’[23]
This is as clear as a geometric definition. Mind and matter are admitted to be the two opposite termini of thought; they are divided by an interval beyond which thought cannot go. They are symbolized as x and y, two equally unknown, but absolutely unlike, quantities. Beyond the common fact of existence, there is not a quality of the one that is not infinitely unlike all the qualities of the other.
What this disparity is we all know: enough, that matter is inert, absolutely without perceiving power, and unable in itself to move or to produce motion. But mind is conscious, knows that it exists; and, however mysteriously, originates motion. Matter has mass; mind is absolutely without it. Matter cannot be thought of save as an occupant of space. Mind has no extension.
Is it conceivable, then, that we should be required by this philosophy, which thus admits the utter disparity of mind and matter, to make mind a function of matter? that we should be asked to mentally follow a process by which y shall be changed into x? This verily is so!