reason." And the writer goes on to make an "uncompromising assertion of
reason as the one supreme faculty of man. To depreciate reason (he says)
to the profit of some supposed 'moral' illative sense, would be to open
the door to the most desolating of all scepticisms, and to subordinate
the basis of our highest intellectual power to some mere figment of the
imagination."


[Footnote 1: July, 1885, p. 211, in the course of the article to which I
have already alluded.]

On the other hand, some writers (claiming to derive their argument from
the Scriptures) have supposed they could assert three distinct natures
in man--a spiritual, a mental (or psychic), and a bodily. Now there is
no doubt that, rightly or wrongly (I am not now concerned with that),
the Bible does distinctly assert that a "breath of lives" [1] was
specially put into the bodily form of man, and adds that thereby "man
became a living soul." But it is also stated of the animal creation that
the breath of life was given to them,[2] and animals are said to have a
"soul" (nephesh).[3] So that neither in the one case nor the other have
we more than the two elements: a body, and a life put into it; though of
course the man's "life" (as the plural indicates, and other texts
explain) was higher in kind than that of the animal.


[Footnote 1: The plural of excellence appears to mark something superior
in the spirit of man over that of the animals. Also compare Job xxxiii.
4, "The breath of the Almighty hath given me life," with Isa. xlii. 5
and Zech. xii. 1.]