Henry A. Mott

“ Science has to start from some point, and that point must have a scientific foundation—the foundation of science is matter, which is inseparable from form and force. Natural science teaches that matter is eternal and imperishable; for experience has never shown us that even the smallest particle of matter has come into existence or passed away. "A naturalist," says Haeckel, "can no more imagine the coming into existence of matter than he can imagine its disappearance, and he therefore looks upon the existing quantity of matter in the universe as a given fact." ”

“ What, then, has science demonstrated? Science has demonstrated the Unity of the Forces: Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, motion, are all correlated to one another, and are all mutually convertible one into another. Heat may be said to produce electricity—electricity to produce heat; magnetism to produce electricity—electricity, magnetism, and so on for the rest.
Unity of Matter and Force.—"For if matter were not force, and immediately known as force, it could not be known at all—could not be rationally inferred." ”

“ The great lesson that Berkeley taught mankind was that what we call material phenomena are really the products of consciousness co-operating with some unknown power (not material) existing beyond consciousness. "We do very well to speak of matter," says Fiske, "in common parlance, but all that the word really means is a group of qualities which have no existence apart from our minds." The ablest modern thinkers, then, believe that the only real things that exist are the mind and God, and that the universe is only the infinitely varied manifestation of God in the human conscience. ”

“ Hence we arrive at the sublime idea, since we can in no other way account for the ultimate cause of anything, that it is God's spirit which pervades and sustains all nature. By this admission we are not led to say: "There is no God but force;" but rather, "There is no force but God." God is infinite, and therefore includes nature; but is nature all? It is all that our finite minds can discover, 'tis true; but can there not exist another nature or world unknown to us; and if so, since God is infinite, he will include that world also. Let us look to this and see what science can answer. ”

“ See how weak the conscience of even more highly civilized men are in their dealings with the brute creation; how the sportsman delights in hunting-scenes, Spanish bull-fights, cock-fights, etc.; how indignant was the sensitive Cowper, if any one should "needlessly set foot upon a worm"! The rights of the worm are as sacred in his degree as ours are, and a true conscience will recognize them. ”

“ In whatever way it is looked at, life is but a forced condition. "The more advanced thinkers, then, in science to-day," says Barker, "therefore look upon the life of the living form as inseparable from its substance, and believe that the former is purely phenomenal and only a manifestation of the latter. During the existence of a special force as such, they retain the term only to express the sum of the phenomena of living beings. The word life must be regarded, then, as only a generalized expression signifying the sum-total of the properties of matter possessing such organization." ”

“ We can therefore bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, without discovering in it a so-called 'divine revelation.' That it cannot be such is clear from the fact that two great fundamental errors are asserted in it, namely, first the geocentric error, that the earth is the fixed central point of the whole universe, round which the sun, moon and stars move; and secondly, the anthropocentric error that man is the premeditated aim of the creation of the world, for whose service alone all the rest of nature is said to have been created. ”

“ If force cannot exist and operate without matter, then force depends for its existence and operation on the forceless, which destroys itself; or force depends for its existence on matter as some property or force, and so matter and force are identified, and force depends on itself only, as it must." [30] The idea, then, that force is an attribute of matter and inherent in it, is absurd, for there is not a shadow of evidence that force is or can be an attribute of matter. We have no knowledge of the origin of any force save of that which emanates from human volition. ”

“ Let us now apply this theory of evolution to the physical world. No determined opposition by the mass of people is likely to be manifested to the doctrine of evolution as applied to the physical world, or even to the vegetable or animal world up to man; but the minute man is included—then is a voice raised up against it, and it was for this reason that Darwin in his first work on the "Theory of Descent" did not mention man as being included in the evolutionary series. ”

“ Savage states in a few words, it is "one that knows and is adjusted to the realities of life. When men know the truth about God, about themselves—body and mind and spirit—about the real relations of equity in which they stand to their fellow-men in state and church and society, and when they appreciate these, and adjust their conscience to them, then they will have a true conscience. An absolutely true conscience, of course, cannot exist so long as our knowledge of the reality of things is only partial." ”

“ If there exist a class of people so inferior in their mental faculties as these, it is not difficult for us to understand how the educated animal who possesses memory, attention, association, and even some imagination and reason, can become capable of abstraction, &c., in an inferior degree even to the savage. It certainly cannot be doubted that an animal possesses mental individuality—as when a master returns to a dog which he has not seen for years, and the dog recognizes him at once.
One of the chief distinctions between man and animals is the faculty of language. ”

“ BY THE SLOW PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT. It is necessary now to take up the little mass of living matter, admitting its coming into existence by spontaneous generation as probable, and so probable that it almost amounts to a certainty, and follow it through the many changes it is about to make under the influence of the laws which govern evolution until it has culminated in man, and these laws still acting on the brain of man, perfecting it, and leading him on to the comprehension of a grander and nobler conception of the Almighty and of his works. ”

“ It is evident that it is to faith that science owes, to a very great extent, her progress and development; for it is impossible for man to prove by experimental demonstration all the facts of science, and since a certain number of facts have got to be accepted before a new experiment can be attempted, he has to accept on faith that such and such a statement is a fact, because such and such a scientist has claimed to have demonstrated it. ”

“ Savage says, "The movement of electricity along a telegraph-line is accompanied by certain molecular changes in the wire itself; but the wire is not electricity, neither does it produce it. Thus modern science has found it utterly impossible to explain mind either as a part or a product of matter. It is perfectly reasonable, then, for any man to believe in a purely intellectual and spiritual existence, apart from any material form or substance."
To comprehend the immortal life is an impossibility; it transcends any earthly experience of man. ”

“ As to the form, it is impossible to find any essential difference in the external form and inner structure between inorganic and organic bodies—for the simple monad, which is as much a living organism as the most complex being, is nothing but a homogeneous, structureless mass of protoplasm. But just as the inorganic substance, according to well-defined laws, elaborates its structure into a crystal of great beauty, so does the protoplasm elaborate itself into the most beautiful of all structures—the cell unit. ”

“ As in finding out what is peculiar to a living body in distinction to a body not living, we found it absurd to take man as the perfection of the animal scale—the microscopic monad possessing life as well as him—so in the case of man's mental attributes, which have always been increasing, always perfecting, since the first genuine man came into existence, it would be equally absurd to compare the intellectual man of to-day with an ape to see what attributes he possesses which the ape does not possess ”

“ The atheist has decided not to believe in the existence of a God, unless he can see Him and understand Him; in other words, the finite would comprehend the infinite. Following the logical method of reasoning of an atheist, the simple fact of seeing God in no way ought to prove his existence. For when you say you see a person, and that you have not the least doubt about it, I answer, that what you are really conscious of is an affection of your retina. ”

“ First Theory.—By the first theory the world is supposed to have existed from eternity under its actual form. Aristotle embraced this doctrine, and conceived the universe to be the eternal effect of an eternal cause; maintaining that not only the heavens and the earth, but all animate and inanimate beings, are without beginning. To use Huxley's illustration: If you can imagine a spectator on the earth, however far back in time, he would have seen a world "essentially similar, though not perhaps in all its details, to that which now exists. ”

“ It becomes, then, the duty of every man to search for truth, for his conscience is not infallible, and by so doing he will bring it to accord with the real facts of God. "Throw away," says Savage, "prejudice and conceit, seek to make your conscience like the magnetic needle. The needle ever and naturally seeking the unchanging pole." As conscience, then, is but a faculty capable of development, it is not so difficult to understand a race of people whose conscience was in just the first stages of development ”

“ We have now very briefly reviewed the principal outlines of the ancestors of man, showing that man has developed from the little mass of protoplasm, as have all animals and plants. He therefore was not spontaneously created, but was developed. The question is often asked by simple-minded people, with much delight, Why do we not behold the interesting spectacle of the transformation of a chimpanzee into a man, or conversely of a man by retrogression into an orang?—it only shows that they are not acquainted with the first principles of the Doctrine of Descent. ”

“ The molecule of matter such as we know, then, may have been, and very probably was, produced by evolution from the atoms or vortex rings of ether, according to the theory advanced by the authors of the work called the "Unseen Universe," which I have referred to. The world of ether is to be regarded in some sort the obverse complement of the world of sensible matter, so that whatever energy is dissipated in the one is by the same act accumulated in the other; or, as Fiske describes it, "it is like the negative plate in photography, where light answers to shadow and shadow to light." ”

“ It is evident, then, that matter, the only thing the materialist concedes real existence, is simply an orderly phantasmagoria; and God and soul, which materialists regard as mere fictions of the imagination, are the only conceptions that answer to real existence. ”

“ It is evident that both natural and artificial selection depends on adaptation and inheritance. The difference between the two forms of selection is that, in the first case, the will of man makes the selection according to a plan, whereas in natural selection the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest acts without a plan other than that the most adaptable organism shall survive which is most fit to contend with the circumstances under which it is placed. ”

“ For the whole living world, then, the primary and a mental form of life is merely an individual mass of protoplasm in which no further structure is discernible. Well, then, has protoplasm been called the "universal concomitant of every phenomena of life." Life is inseparable from this substance, but is dormant unless excited by some external stimulant, such as heat, light, electricity, food, water, and oxygen. ”

“ No matter how wonderful this may seem, the fact stares us in the face that the entire human child, as well as every animal with all their great future possibilities, are in their first stage a small ball of this complex homogeneous substance. ”

“ Have we not a right to ask 'why a special force (vital force) should be needed to effect the transformation of physical forces into those modes of energy which are active in the manifestation of living beings, while no peculiar force is deemed necessary to effect the transformation of one mode of physical force into any other mode of physical force? ”

“ Herbert Spencer defined evolution as consisting in a progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from general to special, from the simple to the complex; and this process is considered to be traceable in the formation of worlds in space, in the multiplication of the types and species of plants and animals on the globe, in the origination and diversity of languages, literature, arts and sciences, and in all changes of human institutions and society. ”

“ As there existed an invisible universe before the visible one came into existence, we can conclude that there still exists an invisible universe now, and that this invisible universe will still exist when the present visible one has passed away. Let us see what light our finite senses can throw on this. It is well known that all our senses have only a certain narrow gauge within which they are able to bring us into sensible contact with the world about us. ”

“ We can as little imagine a first beginning of the eternal phenomena of the motion of the universe as of its final end." [25] It is evident, then, that the absolute beginning of the universe and its absolute end are not questions of science, and can be known only as revealed by faith. Paul says: "By faith we understand that the world was framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which appeared." ”