We have to confess, I think, that reason is against this, and that when we allow ourselves to expect or to fear such an anti-climax we are influenced rather by prejudice, conscious or unconscious. Prejudice is born of our every-day dealing with things and our every-day notions about causes and about bodies. We think spirit is dependent upon matter, not as upon a living and responsive instrument of transmission and self-development to a certain necessary point of self-consolidation; but as most things we deal with depend upon other things, which, as we say, cause them, produce them, or make them do and be and happen. We suppose all too easily that just as steam ceases when the boiler-fires are drawn, so when the body dies life, its product, ceases too. We see the leaves fall from the trees to perish. _Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse,_—it is the common lot of things and men. It is familiar—what more need be said? The burden of proof lies on the man who would tell us of exceptions to the rule.
Yet, if and when we come to examine things and men, do we discover any such rule applicable to men? Are we not all but compelled, reading the astounding story of evolution in the light cast upon it by its culmination in man, to question every uncriticized and easily formed opinion on a subject so complex and profound? If indeed there is evidence to show that life is neither produced by nor released from matter, but is in some sort conjoined with matter, lifting it from its own level, and using its powers in a way altogether different from their normal material course; if there is evidence that these powers are made to fulfil a purpose that can be no other than a purpose for life; then, obviously, matter, in the order of power and of nature, is life's subordinate. We must, indeed, as reasonable beings, correct those easy opinions—these things being thus. The similes and illustrations of every day do not fit the case. Intimate as is the relation between spirit and matter, there is no more reason to think life is produced by a material substance than to think the boiler-fire is produced by the steam. Both thoughts are equally absurd, and perhaps the chief cause of our thinking so easily the one and of our being quite unable to think the other is that we can see and touch boilers and the like, and cannot see and touch 'spirit and life.'