Evolution: Its nature, its evidence, and its relation to religious thoughtLeConte, Joseph
Religion
Evolution: Its nature, its evidence, and its relation to religious thought
LeConte, Joseph
Evolution (Biology); Evolution (Biology) -- Religious aspects; Religion and science
Such is, in brief, the argument. Now, the answer: We may do all
we have supposed and much more. We may push our knowledge in this
direction as far as the boldest imagination can reach, and even
then we are no nearer the solution of this mystery of the relation
of brain-changes and mental changes than we are now. Even then it
would be impossible for us to conceive _how_ brain-changes produce
mental changes or _vice versa_. Physical changes in sense-organs,
transmitted along nerve-fibers, determine changes in brain-substance.
So much is intelligible. But now there appear--how it is impossible
to imagine--consciousness, thought, emotion, etc.--phenomena of an
entirely different order, belonging to an entirely different world. So
different, that it is impossible to imagine the nature of the nexus
between, or to construe the one in terms of the other. Brain-cells are
agitated and thought appears: Aladdin’s lamp is rubbed, and the genie
appears. There is just as much intelligible causal relation between the
two sets of phenomena in the one case as in the other.
Now, this mystery is not of the nature of those which disappear under
the light of knowledge. On the contrary, science only brings it out in
sharper relief, and emphasizes its absolute unsolvableness. Suppose
an absolutely perfect knowledge, perfect in degree, but human in kind.
Suppose an ideally perfect science--a science which has so completely
subdued its domain, and reduced it to such perfect simplicity, that
the whole cosmos may be expressed in a single mathematical formula--a
formula which, worked out with plus signs, would give every phenomenon
and event which shall ever occur in the future, and with minus signs
every phenomenon and event which has ever occurred in the past. Surely,
this is an ideally perfect science. Yet, even to such a science, the
relation of brain-changes to mental states would be as great a mystery
as now. It would even come out in stronger relief, because so many
other apparent mysteries would disappear. Like the essential nature of
matter or the ultimate cause of force, this relation lies evidently
beyond the domain of science. It requires some other _kind_ of
knowledge than human to understand it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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