The special merit of the Ward theory lies in the supposition that mind and matter are elements everywhere inseparably united, and that human intelligence is developed by the aggregation and organization of the mind powers that reside in the atoms of matter,--an explanation which does not often occur to the exponents of materialism,--and has the merit of ingenuity. The theory would do very well if it were not demonstrable that life exists only from influx, and that human life and personality survive the body, and become known to every highly organized sensitive, who knows how to investigate such matters.
The Ward theory demolishes the Deity with the greatest ease, and places man, fleeting or evanescent as he is, at the summit of the universe! As he expresses it, "The only intelligence in the universe worthy of the name is the intelligence of the organized beings which have been evolved; and the highest manifestations of the psychic power known to the occupants of this planet is that which emanates from the human brain. Thus does science invert the pantheistic pyramid."
Such is the fog that emanates from the institution that should help the advance and diffusion of knowledge. No God! no soul! not even the awful power that Spencer blindly acknowledges--nothing but matter bubbling up and organizing itself into temporary forms that decay and are gone forever. We may well reciprocate his suggestion, and say that such doctrines belong to the _limbus fatuorum_, and, if enjoyed as Mr. Ward enjoys them, they may well be called the "fool's paradise." I think Hegel has some similar notion--that God becomes conscious only in man, unconscious everywhere else! And even so brilliant a writer as M. Renan says, "For myself I think that there is not in the universe any intelligence superior to that of man." In reading such expressions we are strongly reminded of the poem on the "rationalistic chicken," which would not admit that it ever came out of an egg. When the wisdom shown in the universe is so immensely beyond the comprehension of man, how can he assume his own to be the highest wisdom?
To such dreary absurdities as this the _Open Court_ newspaper at Chicago is devoted, and it has a bevy of well-educated friends and supporters--well-educated as the world goes,--and graced with literary capacity and culture, but educated into blindness and ignorance of the scientific phenomena of psychic science,--unwilling to investigate or incapable of candid investigation. The coterie sustaining such a newspaper are precisely in the position of the contemporaries of Galileo, who refused to look through his telescope or study his demonstrations.