THE

CHURCHMAN'S MONTHLY REVIEW

AND CHRONICLE.

AUGUST, 1843.

ESSAYS ON PARTIAL DERANGEMENT OF THE MIND, IN SUPPOSED CONNEXION WITH RELIGION. By the late JOHN CHEYNE, M.D., F. R.S. E., M.R.I.A., Physician General to her Majesty's forces in Ireland. With a Portrait and Autobiographical Sketch of the Author. Dublin: Curry and Co. 1843.

THE real difficulty of this subject, is its connexion with a secret beyond the reach of human investigation: a secret in the workmanship of God which has not been revealed; nor any approaches at present made toward the discovery of it. We mean the difference between soul and body, and the dependence of what we call mind, on either or on both. For practical purposes and for common parlance, we know indeed enough: there is a body and there is a soul, and these together constitute one man, while we are sure they are not one and the same thing. But the moment we attempt to examine these essences separately, to discern the separate capabilities and responsibilities of either, or where either begins or ends its independent power, we find that we do not know so much as the difference between them. We are accustomed to speak of the soul as our immaterial part; and to suppose that we know what we mean when we so speak. Generally, perhaps, we do know what we mean, because we intend by immaterial, that part of man which was not of the dust, and is not destined to return to the dust again. Having thus in our own minds a definition for the word, a conscientious alarm is often felt on the mere sugges

tion that the mind and character of a man may be affected by his corporeal organization, lest it tend to what is called materialism: the belief, that is, that the entire man is only organized and animated dust, and will be nothing more when the living principle expires. By revelation of God we know that this is false: body and soul are not the same thing-had not the same origin, and are for a season to be separated: the body is to return to the dust whence it was taken, and the soul to Him that gave it. While our distinction of material and immaterial means no more than this, it serves our purpose well enough. But if we think we understand what the words really signify, and define in using them a known difference of nature in the body and the soul, we only confuse ourselves the more. We have become experimentally acquainted with the common properties of matter, by being conversant with its essentials every day; and we know and perceive that those properties entire pertain to the mortal body, whether in life or death, and therefore call it our material part. But why do we say the soul is immaterial? Simply because it has properties which we see not that matter has, as it comes under our observation in the inanimate world around us; and because the bible speaks of spirit as of something quite distinct in its nature and characters from the flesh and blood of even the living man. But whether it

be or be not another form of matter, is nowhere told us: neither what it is, if it be not so; or any reason why it cannot be. If we turn to 1 Cor. xv., we perceive that the body itself is there declared to become spiritual. Does it cease to be material or does it not? This we do not know: but we are sure the risen body does not become the soul; they are as distinct as they were before: nevertheless the carnal body has perished; and if, as we suppose, the spiritual body is material again, it is a form of matter of which we know not the properties, any better than we know the properties of the soul as it now dwells in flesh, and will hereafter abide in consciousness without the body. The term spiritual, as used in holy writ, seems rather opposed to carnal, than to material: and carnal is often applied to mind as well as body: the whole mundane nature of the fallen man.

Again, we distinguish the soul from the body, by speaking of it as our immortal part. This also is a just distinction in a very important sense; and the Scripture declares it to us absolutely.

The body that now is, must die : or we should rather say, is to die: the soul shall live for ever. Not for a moment can our real ignorance of the manner of their being, overcloud this fact: nor any supposed increase of our knowledge rid us of it. The Bible absolutely states that Abraham and the fathers were not dead, although their bodies

had not only been laid in the grave and suffered dissolution, but are expressly declared to remain there until the day of the resurrection proving again that the one man has two several parts, of which the nature and destiny are not the same. But if we think

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that we define those several natures, by saying that one is mortal and the other immortal; and can bring into doubt the immortality of the soul by ascribing moral action to material organization, we assuredly get beyond our depth again. That matter is perishable and spirit imperishable, is a purely gratuitous assumption: and if by immortal is intended that it cannot cease to be, that is not true of either body or soul. Nothing is immortal per se but God. Self-existence is the attribute of Deity and we assume, with reverence, that the Creator could not communicate to the creature that essential imperishability which pertains only to himself. The life which the creature receives from God is not a self-maintaining life, and could not preserve itself a single hour, much less to all eternity. We speak vernacularly, not accurately we apprehend, whenever we say the Lord kills-the Lord destroys it needs no interposition of Deity to take life away: the creature dies necessarily, if the divine energy that keeps him in existence be withdrawn. Thus in respect of the body and the soul of man, the one is no more mortal, no more immortal than the other: the revealed distinction being a distinction of destiny rather than of nature. The immortality of the soul consists in God's declared purpose to maintain it in uninterrupted vitality for ever: the mortality of the body consists in his declared and manifested purpose to let it suffer a temporary dissolution, until it please him to make it immortal too, by restoring its vitality and maintaining it alive for ever which proves no difference, but the exact contrary, in the essential capability of body and spirit for immortality: while it certifies again as plainly as before, that the two are not one.

But we think there is yet another assumption, equally incapable of proof, and perhaps more dangerous: viz., that the soul is the only responsible part of a man: so that if it be suggested that a disposition to any particular vice,-to falsehood, for instance, or theft,-may be traced in the physical conformation of the body, the transgressor is acquitted of all moral guilt in the perpetration of the sin he cannot help the conformations of his body. But suppose the disposition be not in his body,-then it is in his soul: and why is he more responsible for the conformation of his soul than of his body? Why do we suppose he is more answerable for the deformities of the one than of the other? Both body and soul, in all their powers and faculties and propensities, bore once the image of their Maker: both were comprehended in the fall-both

in the condemnation: the body as well as the soul is to rise again to judgment: the body as well as the soul is to be punished; and blessed be God, the body as well as the soul is capable of redemption by the blood of Jesus. How then should it affect the moral accountability of man, if it be even proved that every vicious or virtuous propensity has a correspondent bodily formation; that every difference of character is in fact a physical as well as mental difference; making body and soul jointly responsible for their joint infirmities, as we know they are jointly punishable for our transgressions? If we separate their accountabilities, we make it as unreasonable that the body should suffer for the mind's obliquities, as that the soul be the sufferer for the body's mal-formation. They are equally the fruit of sin, and the sources of transgression: both are under the dominion of the controuling will: and may be under the dominion of the sanctifying Spirit: renewed and preserved body and soul to everlasting life. Surely then the pious have not so much to fear, or the sceptical to boast, in any science that seems to make the soul more dependent on the body, the spiritual on the physical, than we may have taken it for granted that it is: while the mind, as we usually speak of it distinct from either, may be under the influence of both; the united manifestation of both parts of the compound manhood.

Suppose it to be experimentally proved beyond the possibility of doubt, that by the disease or removal of a particular portion of the medulla of the brain, while the reason remains otherwise unimpaired, some one moral perception is deranged or totally obliterated; so that an affectionate parent shall begin to hate his children,--a truthful man become addicted to useless lying, an honest man to help himself to what he does not want: is it because a moral perception is thus proved to be located as it were in a certain part of the animal frame, becoming impaired by its derangement, and not manifested at all without its concurrence;we may assume that the man was never responsible to speak the truth, to love his children, to abstain from theft; and could not be amenable to divine justice, if instead of by disease, he had hated his children from self-love, deceived his neighbour for malicious or self-interested ends, or become dishonest from covetous desires? We make these observations, because we know the difficulty always thrown in the way of mental and especially maniacal investigations by the pious jealousy of common thinkers and common talkers about the immortality and immateriality and responsi bility of the soul, whenever attempts are made to trace through the organization of the body, the operations and disorders of the mind. All we desire to show is that while we know certainly by

the word of God the separate destiny of the soul, we know nothing from him of its separate nature: and therefore whatever theory of mind, or of madness, may seem to interfere with our foregone conclusions as to the latter, has no necessary tendency to invalidate the testimony of Scripture respecting the final destiny of man. We take up a senseless stone,-we feel it, see it, weigh it, measure it, divide it we say that size, colour, weight, divisibility, &c. are the properties of matter, and so the stone is matter. We gather a flower, it has all these properties, and therefore it is matter too; but it has something more-it lives and grows: and this, since the stone has it not, we conclude is not a property of matter; we call it organic life, but we know not what it is. We come next to the animal creation-herein are all the properties of the stone and of the plant, but again there is something else: the animal feels, acts, chooses, resists: this is not a property of matter or the effect of organization, since the flower had it not; we call it instinctbut again we know not what it is. And then we come to man,he has all the properties of the stone, the flower, the brute,-but he too has something more: he has reason, judgment, will: this is no property of matter, of organization, or of instinct; nor is it what is called the living principle, since all these subsist without it. We call it mind,-but still again we know not what it is. Here probably we must have for ever stopped, if God had not told us more. He tells us that man has a soul; and that this is what distinguishes him from the brute, invests him with the image of his Maker, and fits him for the fellowship of heaven. If he had not told us, we could have known no more in this case than in the others. Nothing becomes us therefore, but to believe and to submit. And yet so senseless are we and perverse, as to infer, that because we cannot distinguish the properties of the soul as separate from those of the body, and do not know the difference between matter and spirit, therefore there is no spirit and no soul and that spirit may be material, and matter irresponsible: no step of which argument is the sequence of the other; or if it were, would justify the conclusion. Who told us that matter is not responsible to the extent of its capabilities? And if it be made capable of knowing, judging, and determining,--why should it not be responsible for doing so aright? One supposes a man's moral perceptions to be in his brain: another says they are in his heart: a third contends that no portion of the animal frame can have anything to do with moral perceptions, they belong wholly to the soul. Whoever is right, it makes no difference in the accountability of the creature to his Creator. Accountability is not dependent upon the materiality or immateriality of body, soul, or spirit, nor to be got