Philosophical Results of Denial of Miracles [pp. 85-94]

PHILOSOPHICAL RESULTS OF A DENIAL OF MIIIRACLES. 9I
not controlling parts of it. An event happening in darkness
may be due to the same causes as one occurring in the light,
tho it be destitute of all visible phenomena.
But, it will be said, cannot the thought as a spiritual state
enter into the series and guide succeeding states? Certainly
not. The thought is not a force, it is only the other side of a
force, some angular view of a force, itself expressed and firmly
held in a definite, physical, cerebral activity. It is this activity
that controls the next activity and causatively passes into it.
A shadow has no force; a thought as a thought has no force; it
is the image, the accident of a force, working its own way in the
brain, the true receptacle and medium of forces. Sensation
accompanies action, but under the sensation is a physical state
or stimulus, and this is the efficient force. A recollection may
seem to govern action, but it is only a play of images on the
screen as the events march on. The memory itself was induced
by physical conditions, and through those conditions the subse
quent activities took place.
If we once allow thought efficiency as thought, there will be
no end to our embarrassments. Our forces would be lifted out
of all known physical connections; our mental processes would
detach themselves from the conditions from which we sought to
unfold them, and by which to control them.
What, then, is the upshot of this philosophy? Why, that
we have lost all mental coherence, all organic, spiritual life; degraded its every connection into an illusion, and made it the
deceitful shadow of something wholly unlike itself. The intellectual is the inside of the physical, and we get concerning it
whatever conception that language conveys and no more. Bad
thoughts are the dreams of bad digestion. What requires cor rection is the stomach, not the mind. It is now a very small
thing to say that we have lost liberty, we have lost everything;
and what we need is that some one shall snatch us out of this
monstrous nightmare either into life or death, that we may win
something or lose all at once.
Tho this philosophy furnishes us no ground for coherent
thought, tho the thought-process which is so central in our
rational life is utterly lost by it, it may still be said that "con duct is three-fourths of life;" that we can, therefore, in spite of