But the advent of a being who has such faculties as man has, and whose career really conflicts with, and reverses the great process of cosmic evolution, may well have had an origin different in kind from that of every other animal—at least, so far as regards his intellectual principle.[1] For he is a being with two natures in one person, and thus it is that when we speak of "the whole of Nature," or "the natural world," a definition of our meaning is needed in order to avoid ambiguity. The term "Nature" may be used in a broad or in a narrow sense.
In the broad sense[2] of the word, it includes man with all his powers and their effects, while in the narrow sense of the word Nature he is excluded from it.
Much may be said for the latter use of the term, since man, by his intelligence and will, is able to change the whole course of physical causation. Thus his power, when contrasted with all the other powers of Nature known to us, may, in a sense, be termed "supernatural," and he may be truly said to "perform miracles." So great, indeed, is the contrast and distance between man and the world of irrational nature, that it suggests now, as it suggested of old, a contrast and difference on the other side—I mean, it suggested the existence of a "real supernatural"—of a mode of being which is raised above all human nature, as man himself is raised above all infra-human nature.
And so I come to one of the corollaries which I think results from such a change of view with respect to man as the words above quoted[3] from Prof. Huxley would seem to indicate—namely, the recognition of a Divine All-perfect Creator of the world and man.
This corollary Prof. Huxley seems as yet indisposed to admit, although he has elsewhere[4] spoken of man as "here and there reflecting a ray from the infinite source of truth!" He is, as yet, plainly indisposed to admit it, because he declares[5] that the exist-
- ↑ In my Genesis of Species (1871), i). 325, I said: "Man, according to the old scholastic definition, is a rational animal (animal rationale), and his animality is distinct in nature from his rationality, though inseparably joined during life in one common personality. Plan's animal body must have had a different source from that of the spiritual soul which informs it, owing to the distinctness of the two orders to which these two existences severally belong. . . . That the first man should have had this double origin agrees with what we now experience. For, supposing each human soul to be directly and immediately created, yet each human body is evolved by the ordinary operation of natural physical laws. . . . Man is, indeed, compound; in him two distinct orders of being impinge and mingle; and with this composite nature an origin from two concurrent modes of action is congruous, and might be expected a priori."
- ↑ The sense used by me in my Lessons from Nature (John Murray), 1876.
- ↑ See p. 327.
- ↑ See Man's pace in Nature, p. 112.
- ↑ [December Monthly, p. 181.]
