mass of the American people God is not a real thing. They name His name with reverence, they respect the traditions that their fathers have handed down to them, but for themselves they do not attempt to look farther than the hurry and the splendor and the business and the casual honesty of this world." This worldliness has become the rule. There is no better antidote for it, and the unfortunate sordidness and selfishness quite inevitably associated with it, than the presence of institutions in our midst in which noble women, without any thought of personal profit, here and now devote their lives and find their happiness in the care for others with altogether otherworldly motives. Is it any wonder, then, that I say God speed to your work, for it is a great social influence as well as a work of charity?

THE TESTIMONY OF REASON TO THE IMMOR

TALITY OF THE SOUL

ADDRESS BY THE REV. JOHN J. FORD, S.J.

THE Soul's immortality has been the favorite theme of the serious of all ages. Nor is it strange, for on this issue hang the dignity and destiny and duty of mankind—all its brightest hopes and sweetest consolations in distress.

Interesting and important, however, as the question of immortality has always been, it has received new interest and importance in our day from the glamour thrown on its denial by what it is the fashion to call "modern science."

She whose votaries so style her would have us believe "that soul and body are not two distinct things, but merely two aspects, sides, or phases of one and the same thing; that mind is nothing but matter delicately organized; that thought and volition are functions of the brain; and so when the brain dies, we wholly die. This," she adds, "is the grand discovery of the times, and the opposite doctrine is a thing of the past."

Alas for the masses in particular, born to toil and suffer, if they are to live and die on this gospel, the last word of which in practice is wealth, physical comfort, self; a gospel sad enough in any age of the world, saddest in this when the most notable result of our much vaunted progress is to make life softer for the few, but ever harder for the many, to reduce the workman to a mere machine, wearing out his life to turn out luxuries which he may never share himself.

Well, however, for humanity that nature has not left a

truth of such moment to the airy speculations of would-be science or scientists, but has written it deep on the tablets of the minds and hearts of all.

If the materialist cannot read it there, it is because his dim horizon is bounded by the span of the physical order. Nothing for him is real unless it fall under the touch of his senses. To this test he subjects the mind of man, and as no process of the laboratory, no keenness of the dissecting knife, no power of the microscope will lay bare its simplicity and spirituality, he triumphantly concludes that it is not simple, not spiritual, and therefore not immortal. His way of reasoning forcibly recalls that of the atheist, who, on the kindred subject of the existence of God, said he had examined the sea with a plumb-line, the earth with a retort, the sky with a telescope, and the stars with a spectroscope, and because by none of these means he could discover a God, there was no God.

"But," interrupts your materialist, "not merely have our experiments failed to find the seeds of immortality in the human mind, they have gone farther-they have actually found the seeds of mortality. The brain, they have revealed to us, is the seat and organ of thought; by its size, form, and structure mental power may be accurately measured. In childhood and in old age, when the understanding is less vigorous, the brain is smaller than in full-blown manhood or womanhood; in women smaller than in men; smaller in the colored man than in the white. There are certain sets of conceptions which depend so absolutely upon certain portions of the brain that if those portions be removed or injured, the conceptions disappear or are impaired. And to be brief, what more signal proof of the material, and consequently mortal, character of the so-called soul can you have than that the anatomist's scalpel is able to take it away bit by bit?"

This position, however, does not better the case of our adversary. And, first, his unqualified statement of facts is not quite true. The learned Mr. Davis in a recent work proves from a comparison of 1139 skulls, belonging to 133 different races from every part of the world, the fallacy of all theories which connect low intellectual capacity with small brain dimensions. Neither will it do to have recourse to the number and thickness of the folds on the surface of the brain nor to its richness in phosphorus. For in these two respects man is surpassed by proverbially stupid animals; in the first by the ox, and in the second by the sheep and the goose. Moreover, there are many striking instances of intellectual power remaining undiminished or even intensified in extreme old age. Sophocles composed one of the most beautiful of his tragedies at ninety; Plato continued his lofty literary work up to the age of eighty-one; and death, so Cicero tells us, came upon him as he was seated at his desk, pen in hand. Fabius Maximus at eighty saved the Republic of Rome; Humboldt in his seventy-sixth year began the crowning task of his life; Newman and Gladstone were brilliant to the close. Leo XIII when past ninety and Pius X at eighty governed the Catholic Church with admirable wisdom. It has been further shown that in persons who were found after death to have existed with only one-half of the brain, the mental faculties were unimpaired.

But even were all the facts just as they are alleged by our opponent, his inference from them would be false. Doubtless man cannot think without a brain. Doubtless the various developments of intelligence correspond with developments of the brain. Doubtless the removal of a particular portion of the brain or grave injury to it is followed, for a time at least, by the cessation or halting of the faculty of which that portion was the organ or instrument. But it is a strange sort

of logic which pronounces as a necessary conclusion from these facts that the mind is nothing but the brain, and thought and volition acts of the brain. The musician cannot play without an instrument, nor can he produce certain sounds if the notes whereon he would express them are lacking or dumb,

"But his breath is not the flute,

Both together make the music

Either marred, and all is mute."

The brain is requisite to the action of the intellect, not as the organ that exercises the intellectual act, but as supplying the material on which the intellect works; for without the brain the intellect could neither receive impressions from the outer world nor react upon them, and if it could not lead, the will could not follow. Hence the brain is the instrument of the mind, not the mind itself; it is the condition of thought and volition, not the cause.

How could the brain be the mind? Their properties are so opposed as mutually to exclude each other. This is clearly seen in a familiar fact which has been considered by deep thinkers as the most wonderful fact in the universe. In the act of self-consciousness there is a complete reflection of an invisible agent back upon itself. I make this act, and between myself knowing and myself known there is a perfect identity. I reflecting am the selfsame as I reflected upon. I am at once agent and patient, subject and object. Now an action of this kind is against the very nature of matter. One part of a material substance may be made to act upon another; one atom may attract, repel, or in various ways influence another; but that the same portion of matter, that one and the same atom can act upon itself, can be agent and patient, subject and object