Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
But it is definite and not indefinite morality which differences
man from the brute. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, concedes that
man passed through a period when he resembled the ape more than
any known animal, but at the same time declares that no anthropoid
ape could develop into a man. The brute can be defined in terms of
man, but man cannot be defined in terms of the brute. It is
significant that in insanity the higher endowments of man
disappear in an order precisely the reverse of that in which,
according to the development theory, they have been acquired. The
highest part of man totters first. The last added is first to
suffer. Man moreover can transmit his own acquisitions to his
posterity, as the brute cannot. Weismann, Heredity, 2:69—“The
evolution of music does not depend upon any increase of the
musical faculty or any alteration in the inherent physical nature
of man, but solely upon the power of transmitting the intellectual
achievements of each generation to those which follow. This, more
than anything, is the cause of the superiority of men over
animals—this, and not merely human faculty, although it may be
admitted that this latter is much higher than in animals.” To this
utterance of Weismann we would add that human progress depends
quite as much upon man’s power of reception as upon man’s power of
transmission. Interpretation must equal expression; and, in this
interpretation of the past, man has a guarantee of the future
which the brute does not possess.
(_c_) Psychology, however, comes in to help our interpretation of
Scripture. The radical differences between man’s soul and the principle of
intelligence in the lower animals, especially man’s possession of
self-consciousness, general ideas, the moral sense, and the power of
self-determination, show that that which chiefly constitutes him man could
not have been derived, by any natural process of development, from the
inferior creatures. We are compelled, then, to believe that God’s
“breathing into man’s nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7), though it
was a mediate creation as presupposing existing material in the shape of
animal forms, was yet an immediate creation in the sense that only a
divine reinforcement of the process of life turned the animal into man. In
other words, man came not _from_ the brute, but _through_ the brute, and
the same immanent God who had previously created the brute created also
the man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account