The Baptist Quarterly (Volume 5)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1871 Excerpt: ... as represented by such men as Mill, Bain, and Spencer, these vagaries of physiology, though it is undoubtedly true that the associationalists have contributed to the advance of these material modes of thought. In one respect, however, they have rendered a moat important service to the side of the spiritual philosophy. For, in making sensibility the basis of mind and resolving psychical phenomena into physical feelings, they have enabled us to explain brute life. Their system indeed applies to the animal rather than to man. The association of sensations probably makes up the whole of animal intelligence. But by this explication of brute existence without the necessity of calling in the hypothesis of spirit, we build up an impassable barrier between it and human reason. Every attempt to bring the whole of man's being under physical laws, has been and must be a failure. As the result of these attempts, he appears only more distinctly a man, definitely discriminated from nature. The law of the association of feelings, also, applied to the human mind, discloses only more clearly the presence in it of ideas, which cannot be founded on a physical basis. We freely confess to the success of the physiological method in some of its applications; but so soon as it comes to the higher powers and products of the mind, its inadequacy is strikingly manifest. Human nature, put into the Tllembic of material forces, exhales, and leaves behind only ashes and gas. Man, says Herder, is not a beast, whose mind is agitated with beastly passions and beastly sympathies, but a calm, deep sea, in which the heavens, with the sun and stars, are mirrored. He is conscious of his relation to a higher world. The proper corrective of this superficial conception of man, is the study of me...