To apply these observations to my special object.  To one who attentively studies man’s immaterial anatomy, much the same complexity is, I think, apparent; the philosopher is too apt to assume it to be much more simple than it is.  It is the very error, as I conceive, into which some of you modern “spiritualists” fall when considering the phenomena of our religious nature.  You do not sufficiently regard man as a complicated unity; you represent, if you do not suppose, the several capacities of his nature,—­the different parts of it, sensational, emotional, intellectual, moral, spiritual,—­as set off from one another by a sharper boundary line than nature acknowledges.  They all work for immediate ends, indeed; but they all also work for, with, and upon each other, for other ends than their own.  Yet, as they all exist in one indivisible mind, or rather constitute it, they form one most intricate machine:  and it can rarely happen that the particular phenomena of our interior nature we happen to be investigating do not involve many others.  Throughout his book on the “Soul,” we find Mr. Newman employing expressions (though I admit there are others which contradict them) which imply that the phenomena of religion, of what he calls “spiritual insight,” may be viewed in clearer distinction from those of the intellect, than, as I conceive, they ever can be; and that a much clearer separation can be effected between them than nature has made possible.  To hear him sometimes speak, one would imagine that the logical, the moral, and the spiritual are held together by no vital bond of connection; nay, from some expressions, one would think that the “logical” faculty had nothing to do with religion, if it is not to be supposed rather to stand in the way of it; that the “intellect” and the “spiritual faculty” may each retire to its “vacant interlunar cave,” and never trouble its head about what the other is doing.  Thus he says in one place, “All the grounds of Belief proposed to the mere understanding have nothing to do with Faith at all.” (Soul, p. 223.) In another, “The processes of thought have nothing to quicken the conscience or affect the soul.” (ibid. p. 245) “How, then, can the state of the soul be tested by the conclusion to which the intellect is led?” (ibid. p. 245.) And accordingly you see he everywhere affirms that we ought not to have any better or worse opinion of any man for his “intellectual creed”; and that “religious progress” cannot be “anticipated” till intellectual “creeds are destroyed.” (Phases, p. 222.)

Here one would imagine that the intellectual, moral, and spiritual had even less to do with the production of each other’s results than matter and mind reciprocally have with theirs.  These last, we see, in a thousand cases act and react upon one another; and modify each other’s peculiar products and operations in a most important manner.  How much more reasonably may we infer that the elementary faculties of the same indivisible mind will not discharge their functions without important reciprocal action; that in no case can we have the process pure and simple as the result of the operation of a single faculty!