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We can define "spirit" only by negations, but the negations are positive, inasmuch as it is the limitations and imperfections of matter that they deny. Spirit, though it uses material organs and implements, is distinct from them, their owner and master. Modern science derives man's parentage from what we have been accustomed to call the lower order of beings. I confess a strong preference for the genealogy whose two connecting links are, "which was the Son of Adam, which was the Son of God." Man has the same material conditions, surroundings, and necessities with his humbler fellow beings. But is there in man an immaterial, supra-material consciousness, in which he differs from the brutes, not in degree alone, but in kind, something into which: instinct could never grow, occupying a range of thought, knowledge, and aspiration which to the brute is and ever will be an unexplored region? This question we attempt to answer.

1. Note man's power of progress, as manifested both individually and collectively. The swallow builds as good a nest the first spring of his life as he will ever build. But man's antecedents and surroundings do not furnish the first elements for calculating his orbit, which may intersect the outermost circle of the material system to which he belongs, and stretch on unto the unmapped region beyond, as the comet wings its flight into depths of space remoter than the planet's round. Man, also, alone of all animals, grows collectively, and from generation to generation. Each generation of men mounts on the shoulders of that which preceded it. Facts are epitomised into principles! knowledge is condensed into general truths, and the acquisitions of a thousand years are carried by the child from the primary school. There is no physical peculiarity in man that can account for this power of progress. Is it ascribed to speech? The human hand cannot account for man's progress. Man's power of progress is due to causes wholly unconnected with his physical development, and with the possibility of material consciousness. We have no proof that other animals have any knowledge, except that which comes to them immediately through the senses. They evince no apprehension of principles, of multitudinous, comprehensive facts, of general truths. Man's superiority consists in his capacity for super-sensual ideas, and these cannot be elaborated by any conceivable material apparatus. Man with his mental vision sees a class or a law as distinctly as the eye discerns an individual object; and still further, by higher stages of abstraction and generalisation, he resolves clusters of classes into more comprehensive classes, fascicles of laws into single laws of a broader scope, till in every department he seizes upon some one unifying principle under which all the classes may be grouped, or to which all the laws may be referred. He then, from these principles, deduces inferences which the senses never could have discovered. And man's entire imaginative apparatus is super-sensual.

2. The phenomena of man's moral nature cannot be derived from his material organisation. Of all beings on the earth, man alone cognises the distinction between right and wrong. The first question in ethics, whether theoretical or practical, concerns the nature of moral distinctions — the essential difference between right and wrong. Material philosophers see the origin of this distinction in the differing sensations of pleasure and pain; and that conscience results solely from the observation of what is approved and what disapproved. But materialism cannot account for either a man's moral or a man's religious nature. We conclude that natural science cannot detach man's hold upon the ancestral tree which traces his parentage from God. In Jesus Christ Himself we find the strongest of all arguments against the theory of material evolution as applicable to the higher portion of man's nature.

(A. P. Peabody, D. D.)

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KJV: But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.

WEB: But there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding.