FATHER DALGAIRNS ON THE THEORY OF THE SOUL.

THE December number of the Contemporary Review,—which certainly succeeds singularly well in getting thoroughly able and patient thought from all quarters of the intellectual world, without regard to either clique or opinion,—has a very eloquent and striking paper by one of the most distinguished of the Brompton Oratorians, Father Dalgairns, on the theory of the human soul. He notices first the wonderful power that has been exerted by Christianity in implanting the belief in an immaterial principle of life, as one of the popular assumptions of all nations imbued with the Christian tradition. It was long in taking hold of men, and some four to five centuries elapsed before it completely and thoroughly mastered the Christian imagination. Since then, how- over, it has hardly been doubted or disputed till our own day. " For fourteen hundred years," says Father Dalgairns, with terse Catholic candour, "it has maintained its place, from which even the Reformation did not cast it down." "It is only lately that a timid and guarded approach to a materialistic tendency has been made in England by men of great repute." It is on account of this obvious tendency of recent physiological speculation, that Father Dalgairns is anxious to restate the doctrine of the Roman Catho- lic Church on the subject, and to illustrate and defend it, so far as it is possible within the limits of a short essay, by explaining its relation to modern science and discovery. To condense what is already so condensed, would be something like the achievement of the Tours photographers, who reduce twenty or thirty messages to the scale of four square inches of paper, decipherable only under the microscope. We must manage the matter, however, more by selection than by condensation, especially as we must reserve some little space for comment and suggestion.

The authoritative Catholic doctrine, then, which Father Dalgairns reports, and elucidates by argument and exposition is, in technical words, that "man is one complete being, made up of body and soul, in the sense that the intellectual soul is by itself the true and immediate form of body." By "form," however, is here meant, not ' form' in the sense in which you may call the vertebrate structure the ' form' of a certain class of animals, but is rather 'form' in the old Greek sense of that which constitutes and vivifies, and is equi- valent to 'vivifying force,'—that which builds the body, and determines all its functions and activities, which bestows vitality and directs the course of the vitality bestowed. In other words, the intellectual life and the bodily life are two branches from the same stem. What man calls his 'soul' has presided over the building of his body, and yet another manifestation of the same soul is the act of thought. Bodily sensation and intellectual judgment are two distinct manifestations of the same soul. When we call the soul intel- lectual, we call it so from the function by which we know it best and most intimately, the function of thought ; but it has other functions which are outside the sphere of our own self-consciousness, and one of these is assumed to be the power it has of moulding out of matter a fit habitation for itself, and giving matter the vital power which fits it to inform and impress the soul, and to enable the soul to act upon the outer world. The senses are intellectual from the first, because they are the creation of an intellectual principle working on physical media. The intellect is able to receive reports from the senses from the first, because it is the free and reflex activity

of the same principle which constructed the senses. " Body and soul are not two wholes accidentally joined, and separable without hurt to either ; but one organism, in which the parts are for the whole and the whole for the parts." The theory which makes the soul dwell in the body as a sort of house from which it is separable without injury to itself, whenever it chooses " to shuffle off its mortal coil," is a falsehood. The soul co-ordinates not only all the various actions of the body amongst each other, but all the actions of the mind with the actions of the body. It is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer's view, the great co-ordinating power ; but then it is behind the nervous system, and co-ordinates the nervous system with the mental functions, just as the nervous system, in a subordinate fashion, contributes to co-ordinate the lower bodily functions. " All go on in the same one little being, logic and diges- tion, love and circulation, imagination and touch, perception and sensation,—processes as different in kind as can possibly be con- ceived; yet each, though remaining perfectly itself, producing a shock and a reaction on the other. Logic wears the brain, and too much blood in the brain affects the logic ; shame sends the blood to the cheek, and palpitation of the heart produces fear.',

And this is so because the body is built by the soul to impress the soul and be impressed by it,—the bodily organs and the mental energies representing different provinces of the same energy.

Father Dalgairns does not, however, very clearly explain whether or not he considers the body to be a conquest of the intellectual soul from a foreign material, and though bearing the structural impress of the intellectual energy, yet bearing it, rather than constituted by it. We understand him to mean that though the body is certainly part of the personal life, and though the soul is incomplete and maimed, so to say, without the body, yet that the mental faculties, which are at least incommensurable with the bodily functions, are so much more characteristic of the soul, and express so much higher a part of its essence, that we may not incorrectly speak of the body as an organ of the soul conquered from a comparatively foreign world, and as rather the work of the soul than the pure activity of the soul,—while the mental operations are, on the contrary, the characteristic and

essential energies of the soul. Indeed the authoritative phrase for the soul, " the intellectual form of the body," seems to imply that intellectual characteristics are the primary ' notes' of the soul, while the bodily functions are only its achievements in a comparatively subordinate sphere, which express it less adequately and essentially.

We infer this from such language as the following :—Life, says Father Dalgairns,— justly according to Professor Huxley's present lights, but this is still a matter of controversy between those who deny that life can proceed from anything but life, and those who assert it can,—must precede organization ; and " facts show that some peculiar agent is at work in the organism to start the structureless form on its way of successive developments, to throw out its organs, to co-ordinate all its functions, in a word, to make it live. This is a most peculiar work, and requires a definite work- man, other than the sum of its activities. Coupled with the re- quisition of such an agent comes the separate fact of the inde- pendence of the intellectual power ;"—(by which Father Dalgairns means the power of sitting in judgment on the bodily organs and sensations, deducing inferences from them, and judging those inferences by the law of its own thought). " All this points to the conclusion that the independent power indicates the required agent. A more important fact, if it be true, cannot be imagined.

It forms at once a limit to all evolution theories. It follows from it that the most characteristic human action is not evolved from below ; it is not a flower which has its root downwards in the ordinary process of human nature." That, we take it, clearly indicates, that though the Catholic theory makes the body part of the man, it also asserts the body to be a less essential part of the man, than the mind. Whether a true Catholic believes the body to contain any foreign element, which the soul has con- quered and annexed, as it were, from the physical region, or whether he regards the physical garment as being both in substance and structure an achievement of the soul's,—which would thus have provided both the material and the structural power, is a point of

which we do not feel at all sure from Father Dalgairns' paper. If matter be ultimately force' and nothing else,—and we do not suppose the Catholic theory has finally rejected this view,—the body might be not only vivified and built by, but produced out of, the soul.

But not to subtilize too much on the minutiae of this theory, which, whatever may be its purely scientific claims, has obviously as strong points as the materialist theory itself on the side of psychological experience, without its paradox of matter beginning to think proprio nzota,—let us consider a little what are its diffi-

culties. Doubtless every man and woman so far feels the body a

part of the self as to be included in the sphere of self-love and self-respect, and to be closely involved in all the passions and motives which call for self-government ; and for all this Father

Dalgairns' hypothesis would account as satisfactorily as the theory which makes mind a function of matter, indeed more so, for it is

unquestionable that where the directing power is, there is at least the centre of the personal self, and the directing power is not in the body, but the mind. It is clearly not easy to suppose that matter gives birth to its own helmsman. It is far more easy to suppose that something which is essentially intelligent and free is the double cause of both bodily and mental life, than, that something which is neither, suddenly evolves thought and freedom. And further, the organization of the body is so full of intelligent purpose, that it is impossible to believe that the cough, for instance, which, quite involuntarily and uncon- sciously, but quite scientifically, expels a foreign substance from the windpipe, or the nausea by which the stomach rids itself of poisons dangerous to its life, is in any sense

of purely material origin. But then here exactly the diffi- culty begins. Is not Paley reasonable in ascribing those purposes, the fulfilment of which is not included in any conscious human intelligence, directly to a divine intelligence, instead of interpolat- ing between it and the purpose effected, a secondary intellectual cause of the intelligence of which we can find no trace except in the result ? If the eye is adapted to the light, and not to the light only, but to the mental power of men for drawing intellectual and moral inferences through their perceptions of colour and form,— inferences as to the condition of the minds of their fellow-creatures, —is it not simpler to suppose that it is directly fashioned for these ends by the Creative intelligence, than that there is interposed between the two a second cause, called a soul, of the operations of which, in viewing the texture of the body, we have no evidence at all? Purpose is the conscious adaptation of means to ends. Can any real adaptation of means to ends be strictly unconscious ? We have clearly no consciousness at all of the perpetual pumping of the heart, or of the telegraphic system of the nerves, or of the elaborate leverage of the muscles. It may be, and is reasonable to say, here are the qualities of an intellectual substance; but is it reasonable to say, ' here are the qualities of the same intellectual substance of which we have another signal in our conscious thought?' If of the same intellectual substance, why have we no conscious- ness of its actions in the structure of the body, as we have in its structure of our intellectual and moral life? If it does its work without consciousness, why call it intellectual ? If it does it with consciousness, and that consciousness is not ours, why attribute it to the same soul as that of which we are conscious ? The only known fact is that a great and most elaborate organization of the processes of which we are unconscious is in the closest and most mysterious relations with a number of thoughts and feelings of which we are conscious. The intelligence which makes a machine for a factory, and the intelli- gence which uses it when it gets there, are quite distinct. Why identify the organization of the body and the organization of the mind as products of the same intellectual substance, unless you have, at least, proof (which you have not) that the conscious mind, as it is known to us, has the power of giving the structural law to matter of any kind?

Nay, if the structural power of our bodies be of the same source as our own conscious thoughts, should not, at least, the mind have power to stop and impede it by conscious acts of its own ? Yet the fact is, that while a slight pressure on the brain will, as far as we know, stop if not all acts of will, at least all outward manifestation of such acts,—no act of will of which we are capable, will stop directly the functions of the brain. We cannot attack life effectually from the mental side. We can (apparently) attack the mind effectually from the bodily side. Would this be so if they were simply co-ordinated branches from the same stem ? There may be years and years of human physical life without any outward trace of mind. But as yet we cannot say that we ever encountered a mental life without any trace of body. Surely the assumption that the same substance produces both, as co-ordinate branches from the same stem, is as yet by no means a hypothesis which explains even the principal facts ?

And yet we are very far from rejecting the theory which Father Dalgairns has expounded, or bolding that ultimately it will be rejected. We do not believe that the moulding of the body to so wonderful a concert with the conscious life that the latter becomes an open book to others who could never know anything of it except through bodily features and gestures, is really quite explicable on any other theory. The difficulty of ascribing the moulding of the bodily frame, and all the structure of organization of which we have no consciousness, directly to the divine intelligence is very great. Science cannot help treating as a separate entity that the regular growth of which, out of a germ in conformity with a given type, is reducible to regular laws. It is true, too, that though there are no mental processes which are unconscious, there are plenty which are at once quite involuntary and rational, and of which the rationality consists in the involuntari- ness. When a man starts back in fear on receiving a sudden sensation of pain, there is quite involuntary and unreasoning wisdom in the recoil, which only differs from the wisdom involved in the structural adaptation of the eye to light, in that the effect only is conscious, not the cause. When a childis angry at being tripped up by a stone, the irritation is a very wise provision of nature, so far, at least, as it gives a new impulse for the removal of obstacles, though the anger is irrational. In fact, our mental and emotional life, no less than our physical, is fall of rationality the springs of which are certainly not conscious, though the effects are. Is it, then, quite unreasonable to suppose that if there are plenty of orderly and beneficent energies the springs of which lie beneath the surface of our own conscious selves, and which only emerge, as it were, into the light, in what we call thought and feeling, there may be a good many others which, though equally orderly and beneficent, never emerge into the light in this state of existence at all? It is impossible to say, indeed, that an unconscious agency adapts means to ends, for the adaptation of means to ends is a conscious process. But it is possible to say that an unconscious agency implanted by the Creator for the purpose is the instrument of adapting means to ends ; that that agency may be the substratum of a mind fitted to reflect upon itself ; and that as soon as it does reflect upon itself, the substratum of hitherto involuntary processes falls more or less under the direct control of the conscious power. As Father Dalgairns observes, chloroform destroys our sensitiveness only by also destroying our conscious power. If it were conceivable that under any new influence we should become conscious of the great chain of structural bodily functions of which we are now almost com- pletely unconscious, should we not immediately gain the fullest belief in the intellectual origin of the bodily life, and probably, too, gain a modifying power over the bodily processes? And yet that would be nothing more than what already happens to us in relation to fear and other passions. Their origin is quite beyond our will, even beneath the veil of consciousness. Yet no one calla fear or anger a bodily affection. The very fact that it is felt refers it to personal life. If we ever in like manner become conscious of the growth of our tissues or the circulation of the blood, and in some degree able to restrain or stimulate them at will, would not everyone immediately admit that they were due to the vivifying force of a soul, and not to material causes ?