Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
will—renders it impossible to explain his higher nature as a mere
natural development from the inferior creatures. Even Huxley has
said that, taking mind into the account, there is between man and
the highest beasts an “enormous gulf,” a “divergence immeasurable”
and “practically infinite.”
8. The brute has no conscience and no religious nature. No dog
ever brought back to the butcher the meat it had stolen. “The
aspen trembles without fear, and dogs skulk without guilt.” The
dog mentioned by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper
moved by the wind seemed to testify to “a sense of the
supernatural,” was merely exhibiting the irritation due to the
sense of an unknown future; see James, Will to Believe, 79. The
bearing of flogged curs does not throw light upon the nature of
conscience. If ethics is not hedonism, if moral obligation is not
a refined utilitarianism, if the right is something distinct from
the good we get out of it, then there must be a flaw in the theory
that man’s conscience is simply a development of brute instincts;
and a reinforcement of brute life from the divine source of life
must be postulated in order to account for the appearance of man.
Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165-167—“Is the spirit of man derived
from the soul of the animal? No, for neither one of these has
self-existence. Both are self-differentiations of God. The latter
is simply God’s preparation for the former.” Calderwood, Evolution
and Man’s Place in Nature, 337, speaks of “the impossibility of
tracing the origin of man’s rational life to evolution from a
lower life.... There are no physical forces discoverable in nature
sufficient to account for the appearance of this life.” Shaler,
Interpretation of Nature, 186—“Man’s place has been won by an
entire change in the limitations of his psychic development....
The old bondage of the mind to the body is swept away.... In this
new freedom we find the one dominant characteristic of man, the
feature which entitles us to class him as an entirely new class of
animal.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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