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This, as I say, was the notion that haunted me, the link my imagination forged between Sir Eustace Carr's presence in that dark Venetian church, and his self-caused death some years later. But whether it is really a clue to that unexplained mystery, or whether it is nothing more than a somewhat sinister fancy, of course, I cannot say. The Lord Mayor
They were not self-caused, they were not personal existences, nor were they either uncaused; then, as one who breaks the first bamboo joint finds all the rest easy to separate, having discerned the cause of birth and death, he gradually came to see the truth; deeds come from upâdâna, like as fire which catches hold of grass; upâdâna comes from trishnâ, just as a little fire inflames the mountains; trishnâ comes from vedanâ, the perception of pain and pleasure, the desire for rest; as the starving or the thirsty man seeks food and drink, so "sensation" brings "desire" for life; then contact is the cause of all sensation, producing the three kinds of pain or pleasure, even as by art of man the rubbing wood produces fire for any use or purpose; contact is born from the six entrances.
And what makes the case stronger is this: that they chastise for the very fact of ignorance, when it is thought to be self-caused; to the drunken, for instance, penalties are double, because the origination in such case lies in a man's own self: for he might have helped getting drunk, and this is the cause of his ignorance.
R.S. Pattison, and others, have already made the ordinary reader familiar with the main outlines of the subject; and still more because, be the views of archaeologists what they may, it is impossible for any rational person to contend either that they can be reduced to anything like unity among themselves, or that they lead to any conclusion favourable to the belief in the self-caused and undesigned evolution of man.
Here is one of the gaps which the theory of Evolution, true as it is to a certain extent, cannot bridge over; and we must not overlook the fact. We shall revert to it hereafter. Can it be believed, then, that protoplasm, as the origin of life, is self-caused, and self-developed? And this is not all.
I take as self-evident the enormous difficulty of self-caused, self-existent matter. When we see matter acting by law, then if there is no Creator, we have the to us unthinkable proposition of law without a lawgiver!
But the simplest drop of water, in itself, and apart from its mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen two elementary colourless, formless gases.
It is not too much to say that, after the close of the controversy about spontaneous generation, it is now a universally admitted principle of science that life can only proceed from life the old omne vivum ex ovo in a modern form. But here the same sort of argument that was brought forward regarding the possibility of matter and its laws being self-caused, comes in as regards life.
We ask, why? and we are answered, because there is nothing capable of producing it, and therefore it is self-caused i.e. by the first definition the essence of it implies existence as part of the idea. It is astonishing that Spinoza should not have seen that he assumes the fact that substance does exist in order to prove that it must.
The heading of this chapter does not mark a new departure, for we have been tracing existing forms of matter from the first, and have already seen the necessity of believing in Creative Intelligence and Guidance. We have seen that inorganic matter, with what we call its molecular or atomic structure, cannot be reasonably regarded as self-caused; and we have concluded with Sir J.F.W. Herschell that the sight of such a well-arranged army, performing its evolutions in a regular and uniform manner, irresistibly suggests a great Commander and Designer. We have further found that the advent of LIFE demands a Power ab extra. We have called attention to the gap, between plant and animal, which is ignored or made light of, chiefly on account of the close approach of the two kingdoms. But there is one broad distinction, namely, that of elementary reason and no reason, or of consciousness and unconsciousness, which is, in itself, a sufficient difficulty to pull us up shortly. We have not yet fully considered this matter, because it will come more appropriately at a later stage, and in the
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