ONE of Scotland's best thinkers, Prof. Henry Drummond, left us a book, published after his death, in which he tried to forecast a new religion that would shortly come into the world, and one of the propositions he gives is this, "The leading Faculty of this new theology is not to be Reason." He further states, "The old theology was largely a product of reason. It was an elaborate, logical construction. The complaint against it is, that, as a logical construction, it was arrived at by a faculty of the mind, and not a faculty of the soul." Now in these words I think may be found the secret of all the controversy with regard to Christian Science. The one Christian section of humanity is trying to make the human reason the means of advance; the other section, which is somewhat in the minority at present, is looking to spiritual sense for wisdom and guidance.
It would be well for us to look a little closer into the meaning of this word "reason" and acquire a clearer sense of its relation to progress. Mortals have been educated into the belief that reason is the manifestation of the highest activity of the human brain. But what is this brain? Mrs. Eddy, in Science and Health, page 478, says, "How can intelligence dwell in matter when matter is non-intelligent, and brain-lobes cannot think?" Here is a reversal of our educated beliefs, and this statement has been challenged by the world; but to show how the world is coming to the truth in spite of itself, let me quote from an article in Science Siftings (Nov. 24, 1906), which reads thus:—
"Those physiological and surgical facts which show that brain matter has itself no capacity for thought are of such recent discovery that only a relatively small number of persons—mostly specialists—have the least idea that the brain neither originates a word nor forms a notion. Anatomy and physiology alike indicate that the brain is never other than the instrument of what—in the present state of science—must be called the 'personality.' The personality is as different from, as separate from, the brain as the violinist is separate from his violin. It is not brain which makes man. Man makes one of his brain hemispheres human by his own labor. If a human personality entered a young chimpanzee's brain—where, by the way, it would find all the required cerebral convolutions—the ape could then grow into a true inventor or philosopher. For it is the great man who makes the great brain and not the great brain which makes the great man. This is another way of saying that we can make our own brains—so far as special functions or aptitudes are concerned.
