Dr. John Henry Newman has shown us how the doctrine of post-baptismal sin became developed into the discovery of Purgatory with all its geographical details. It would seem as if the doctrine of original sin, in the hands of speculative theologians, might open up to our view a far more transcendental region, compared with which the stairs and terraces and fires of purgatory are as familiar as those of our own hearths and homes.

As to my present state, Du Bois Reymond tells me that not only my bodily but a large part of my mental functions are performed by the motion of atoms under fixed laws, and his result is that the finite mind, as it has developed itself through the animal world up to man, is a double one,—on the one side the acting, inventing, unconscious, material mind, which puts the muscles into motion and determines the world’s history: this is nothing else but the mechanics of atoms, and is subject to the causal law; and on the other side the inactive, contemplative, remembering, fancying, conscious, immaterial mind, which feels pleasure and pain, love and hate: this one lies outside of the mechanics of matter and cares nothing for cause and effect.

Dr. Drysdale tells me that not only my thinking powers but my feelings are functions of the material organism, and that I myself am such a function. He admits that I am not material—no function can be material, for matter is a substance, and a function is not a being at all. Dr. Drysdale, as a Christian materialist, follows his master Fletcher, who says—

“As often as it shall be said that mind or the faculty of thinking is a property of living matter,—that it is born with the body, is developed with the body, decays with the body, and dies with the body,—it is to be understood of the mind only, not the soul. The soul is something not material indeed, but substantial—a divine gift to the highest alone of God’s creatures, responsible for all the actions of mind, but as totally distinct from it as one thing can be from another, or rather as something is from nothing.”

Dr. Drysdale, however, in order to save the dynamical theory of life and mind, says that this soul or spirit must either, if now existing, be a passive spectator of the action of the living being connected with it, or else that he has no existence during this present life, but is to be constituted by a divine act after the death of the living being.

In either case, I cannot identify this soul with myself, for I know that I exist now, and that I act, and that what I do may be right or wrong, and that whether right or wrong, it is my act, which I cannot repudiate.

In this search for information about myself from eminent thinkers of different types, I seem to have learnt one lesson, that all science and philosophy and every form of human speech is about objects capable of being perceived by the speaker and the hearer; and that when our thought pretends to deal with the Subject it is really only dealing with an Object under a false name. The only proposition about the Subject, namely, “I am,” cannot be used in the same sense by any two of us, and, therefore, it can never become science at all.