“Are you sure,” said I, laughing, “that he ever convinced you at all?  However, all your perplexity seems to me to arise from supposing the spiritual powers of man to act in greater isolation from his other powers than is conceivable or even possible.  Not apart from these, but in intimate conjunction with them, are the functions of the soul performed.  The divorce between the ‘spiritual faculties’ and the intellect, which your favorite, Mr. Newman, has attempted to effect, is impossible.  It is an attempt to sever phenomena which coexist in the unity of our own consciousness.  I am bound in justice to admit, that there are others of our ‘modern spiritualists’ who condemn this attempt to separate what God hath joined so inseparably.  Even Mr. Newman does practically contradict his own assertions; and outraged reason and intellect have avenged his wrongs upon them by deserting him when he has invoked them, and left him to express his paradoxes in endless perplexity and confusion.  But this conversation is no bad preface to some observations on this important fallacy, (as I conceive,) which I have appended to the paper I have read, and, with your leave, I will finish with them.”  They assented, and I proceeded.

It is very common for philosophers, spiritual and otherwise, to be guilty of two opposite errors, both exposed in the first book of the Novum Organum.  One is, that of supposing the phenomena which they have to analyze more simple, more capable of being reduced to some one principle, than is really the case; the other, that of introducing a cumbrous complexity of operations unknown to nature.  It is unnecessary here to adduce examples of the last; quite as frequently, at least, man apt to be guilty of the first.  He imagines that complex and generally deeply convoluted phenomena he is called to investigate are capable of being more summarily analyzed than they can be.  The ends to be answered in nature by the same set of instruments are in many cases so various, and in some respects so limit and traverse one another, that though the same multiplicity of ends is attained more completely, and in higher aggregate perfection, than by any device which man’s ingenuity could substitute for them, yet those instruments are necessarily very complex at the best.  Look, for example, at the system of organs by which, variously employed, we utter the infinite variety of articulate sounds, perform the most necessary of all vital functions (that of respiration), masticate solid food, and swallow fluids.  The miracle is, that any one set of organs in any conceivable juxtaposition should suffice to discharge with such amazing facility and rapidity these different and rapidly alternated functions; yet I suppose few who have studied anatomy will deny, that, though relatively to the variety of purposes it has to perform the apparatus is very simple, it is absolutely very complex; and that its parts play into one another with great facility indeed, but with endless intricacy.