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ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES
It is not my ambition to enter into a proof of all these statements today; neither would the duration of a short lecture avail me for that purpose. Still I must give you some indications which you can follow up if you be impressed with anything that I have put before you or that I am going to put before you in the remaining portion of my lecture.
As to the simplicity of the soul-substance, the following passage in MacDougal's Physiological Psychology will speak for itself: "We are compelled to admit that the so-called Psychical elements are . partial affections of a single substance or being; and since, as we have seen, this is not any part of the brain, is not a material substance but differs from all material substance in that while it is unitary, is yet present, or can act or be acted upon, at many points in space simultaneously. we must regard it as an immaterial substance or being. And this being thus necessarily postulated as the ground of the unity of individual consciousness, we may call the soul of the individual."
If you now read the early Christian Fathers you will find they also taught the simplicity of the soul-substance, and a Christian Psychology (see Maher's Psychology) expressly advances arguments to prove that the soul is a simple substance and immortal by nature, since simple things are indestructible, unlike compound things that are destroyed when the parts of which they are composed fall apart.
The next thing to understand is that the substance of souls is pure intelligence. This will become quite clear if we study an act of perception. When I look at that ornamentation on the wall yonder, what happens is that a visual sensory stimulus emanating from the ornamental thing outside me impinges on my eyes and is carried inwards resulting ultimately in perception. But surely this incoming current of stimulus is not knowledge, nor even charged or loaded with knowledge. For what comes from the outside is only matter or energy in one form or another, never knowledge! Whence the knowledge, then, that is implied in perception? Surely not from the without, but only from the within! If you think deep on the subject you will perceive that knowledge is a state of the consciousness of that something which is simple by nature, and which we have now learnt
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