can have caused a mind except another mind? Answer to
this question there is none. For aught that we can ever know to the
contrary, anything within the whole range of the Possible may be competent
to produce a self-conscious intelligence--and to assume that Mind is so far
an entity _sui generis_, that it must either be self-existing, or derived
from another mind which is self-existing, is merely to beg the whole
question as to the being of a God. In other words, if we can prove that the
order of existence to which Mind belongs, is so essentially different from
that order, or those orders, to which all else belongs, as to render it
_abstractedly impossible_ that the latter can produce the former--if we can
prove this, we have likewise proved the existence of a Deity. But this is
just the point in dispute, and to set out with a bare affirmation of it is
merely to beg the question and to abandon the discussion. Doubtless, by the
mere act of consulting their own consciousness, the fact now in dispute
appears to some persons self-evident. But in matters of such high
abstraction as this, even the evidence of self-evidence must not be relied
upon too implicitly. To the country boor it appears self-evident that wood
is annihilated by combustion; and even to the mind of the greatest
philosophers of antiquity it seemed impossible to doubt that the sun moved
over a stationary earth. Much more, therefore, may our broad distinction
between "cogitative and incogitative being"[5] not be a distinction which
is "legitimated by the conditions of external reality."

Doubtless many will fall back upon the position already indicated, "It is
as repugnant to the idea of senseless matter, that it should put into
itself sense, perception, and knowledge, as it is repugnant to the idea of
a triangle, that it should put into itself greater angles than two right
ones." But, granting this, and also that conscious matter is the sole
alternative, and what follows? Not surely that matter cannot perceive, and
feel, and know, merely because it is repugnant to our idea of it that it
should. Granting that there is no other alternative in the whole
possibility of things, than that matter must be conscious, or that
self-conscious Mind must somewhere be self-existing; and granting that it
is quite "impossible for us to conceive" of consciousness as an attribute
of matter; still surely it would be a prodigious leap to conclude that for
this reason matter cannot