II.—The Dynamic Materialism.

It is curious to observe how little able is even exact science to preserve its habitual precision, when pressed backward past its processes to their point of commencement, and brought to bay in the statement of their "first truth." The proposition which supplies the initiative is sure to contain some term of indistinct margin or contents; and usually it will be the term least suspected, because most familiar. The student of nature takes as his principle that all phenomena arise from a fixed total of force in a given quantity of matter; and assumes that, in his explanations, he must never resort to any supposed addition or subtraction of either element. In adopting this rule he must know, you would say, what he means by "matter," and what by "force," and that he means two things by the two words. Ask him whence this principle has its authority. If he pronounces it a metaphysical axiom, you may let him go till he can tell you how there can be not simply an à priori notion of matter and notion of force, but also an à priori measure of each, which can guarantee you against increase or diminution of either. As standards of quantity are found only in experience, he will come back with a new page 40 answer, fetched from the text-hooks of science: that his principle is inductively gathered; in one half of its scope—viz., that neither matter nor force is ever destroyed—proved by positive evidence of persistence;—in the other half—viz., that neither is ever created—proved by negative evidence, of non-appearance. If now you beg him to exhibit his proof that matter is indestructible, he will in some shape reproduce the old experiment of weighing the ashes and the smoke, and re-finding in them the fuel's mass: his appeal will be to the balance, his witnesses the equal weights. Weight, however, is force: and thus, to establish the perseverance of matter, he resorts to equality of force. Again, when invited to make good the corresponding position, of the conservation of force, he will show you how, e.g., the chemical union of carbon and oxygen in the furnace is followed by the undulations of heat, succeeded in their turn by the molecular separation of water into steam, the expansion of which lifts a piston, and institutes mechanical performances: i. e. he traces a series of movements, each replacing its predecessor, and leaving no link in the chain detached. Movements, however, are material phenomena: so that to establish the persistence of force, he steps over to take counsel of matter. He makes assertions about each term, as if it were an independent subject: but if his assertion respecting either is challenged, he invokes aid from the other: and he holds, logically, the precarious position of a man riding two horses with a foot on each, hiding his danger by a cloth over both, and saved from a fall by dexterous shifting and exchange.

Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than a scientific proposition, the terms of which stand in this variable relation to each other. The first of them has been sufficiently fixed in discussing the Atomic conception. It remains to give page 41 distinctness to the second. In order to do so, it will be simplest to follow into their last retreats of meaning the parallel doctrines of the "Indestructibility of Matter" and of the "Conservation of Energy." If our perceptions were so heightened and refined that nothing escaped them by its minuteness or its velocity, what should we see, answering to those doctrines, during a course of perpetual observation?

1. We should see the ultimate atoms; and if we singled out any one of them, and kept it ever in view, we should find it, in spite of "change of form," "always the same." "A simple elementary atom," says Professor Balfour Stewart, "is a truly immortal being, and enjoys the privilege of remaining unaltered and essentially unaffected by the most powerful blows that can be dealt against it."^* Here, then, we have alighted upon the "Matter" which is "indestructible."

2. These atoms might have been stationary; and we should still have seen them in their "immortality." But they are never at rest. They fly along innumerable paths: they collide and modify their speed and their direction: they unite: they separate. However long we look, there is no pause in this eternal dance: if one figure ceases, another claims its place. As in the atoms, so in the molecules which are their first clusters, there is a "state of continual agitation," "vibration, rotation, or any other kind of relative motion;"^† "an uninterrupted warfare going on—a constant clashing together of these minute bodies."^‡ In this unceasing movement among the "immortal" atoms we alight upon the phenomenon, or series of phenomena, de-

^* The Conservation of Energy, p. 7.

^† Theory of Heat, by J. Clerk Maxwell, p. 306.

^‡ Conservation of Energy, by Dr. Balfour Stewart, p. 7.

page 42 scribed by the phrase "Conservation of Energy." So far as the law thus designated claims to be an observed law, gathered by induction from experience, this is its last and whole meaning. We have only to scrutinize its evidence with a little care, in order to see that it simply traces a few transmutations of the perpetual motions attributed to atoms and molecules.

If we chose to shape it thus: "For every cancelled movement or element of movement there arises another, which is equivalent;" everything would be expressed to which the evidence applies. Had we to look out for a proof of such a proposition, we should first consider what it is that makes two movements equivalent: and, in the simplest case,—of homogeneous elements,—we should find it in equal numbers with the same velocity; so that the direct demonstration would require that we should count the atoms and estimate their speed. As we cannot count them, one by one, we weigh them in their masses;—an operation which has the advantage of reckoning at one stroke, along with their relative numbers, also the most important of their velocities. The atoms being all equal, the greater mass expresses the larger number. And weight is only the arrested velocity with which, in free space, they move to one another: it is prevented motion, in the shape of pressure. In order to measure it, i.e. to express it in terms of space and time, we might withdraw the prevention, and address ourselves to the path that would then be described. But it is more convenient to test it by taking it in reverse, and trying what other prevented motion will avail to stop it and hold it ready to turn back. Thus even statical estimates of equilibrium are but a translation of motion into more compendious terms.

If this is a true account of common weights, it still more page 43 evidently applies to the process which gives us the footpound, or "unit of work;" for this is found by the actual lifting of one pound through one vertical foot, i.e. by moving it through a space in a time. And as in this, which is the standard, so in all the changes which it is employed to measure, the fundamental quantity is simply movement, performed, prevented, or reversed.

This fact is easily traced through the proofs usually offered of the Conservation of Energy. The essence of them all is the same:—for each extinguished "unit of work," they find a substituted equivalent movement, molar or molecular. Dr. Joule, for instance, establishes for us a common measure of heat and mechanical work. How does he accomplish this? By applying the descent of a weight to create in moving water friction enough to raise the temperature 1° Fahrenheit; and finding that this result corresponds with a fall of the water through 772 feet. Here, on one side of the equation, we have the movement of the mass through its vertical path; on the other, the molecular movement that constitutes heat, measured by a third movement of an expanding liquid in the thermometer. Where the first is arrested, the second takes its place: and to double one would be to double both.

If heat is made to do chemical work, its undulations are similarly expended in setting up a fresh order of movements; of atomic combination, when burning coal unites with oxygen; of separation, when the fire of a lime-kiln drives its carbonic acid from the chalk. The friction which parts the electricities, the spark which attends their reunion; the crystallization of liquids by loss of temperature, and their vaporization by its increase; the waste of animal tissue by action, and its replacement by food; all reduce themselves to the same ultimate rule,—the exchange page 44 of one set of movements or resistances (i.e. stopped movements) for another, which, wherever calculable, is found to be an equivalent.

To a perfect observer, then, able to follow the changes of external bodies, in themselves and among one another, to their last haunts, nothing would present itself but consecutions and assortments of phenomena, and arrests of phenomena. And if he had noticed, and could name, what on the subsidence of each group would emerge to replace it, he would be master of the law of Conservation. The sciences would distinguish themselves for him by taking cognizance each of its special set of phenomena; as acoustics tell the story of one kind of undulations, optics of another, thermotics of a third. And the law in question would only carry his glance, as it chased the flight of change, across the lines of this divided work, and show him, on the desertion of this field, a new stir in that.

Though the whole objective world has thus been laid bare before him, and he has read and registered its order through and through, he has not yet, it will be observed, alighted on a single dynamic idea: all that he has seen (and nothing has been hid from him) may be stated without resort to any term that goes beyond the relations of co-existence and sequence. The whole vocabulary of causality may absent itself from the language of such an observer. "Were it even given to him, it would carry no new meaning, but only tell over again in fresh words the old story of regular time succession. He might, as Comte and Mill and Bain truly contend, command the whole body of science, including its latest law, without ever asking for the-origin (other than the phenomenal predecessor) of any change.

By no such ideal interpreter of nature, however, have page 45 our actual books of science been written. Never more than now have they abounded in the language which, we have seen, would be superfluous for him. The formula of the new law contains it: for it is the conservation of "Energy," or the correlation of "Forces," which it announces. Are these then some new-comers that we have got to know? or, have we encountered them before under other names, and only found out some new thing about them? "Energy," says Professor Balfour Stewart, "is the power of overcoming obstacles or of doing work."^* I see a flash of lightning pierce a roof and kill a man, and plunge into the earth: the obstacles overcome, the work done, are visible enough; but where is the "power"? what does it add to the phenomenon, over and above these elements? Besides the flash of lightning first, and then the changes in the roof and the man, is there something else to be searched for, and entered, as an object of knowledge, under a separate name? If there be such a thing, by what sense am I to apprehend it? through what aids of art can I penetrate to it? It is obvious that it has no perceptible presence at all; and that its name stands in the definition and in every inductive equation, as an x, an unknown quantity, which itself has to be found before it can add any new relation to the known. "Force," says Professor Clerk Maxwell, "is whatever changes or tends to change the motion of a body, by altering either its direction or its magnitude."^† The shot fired from a gun at a moderate elevation is scarcely out of the muzzle before it quits the straight line for the parabola, and slackens its initial velocity, and soon alights upon the ground. We say the deflection is due to "gravitation." But, if so, this is an invisible part of the fact: no more is observable than

^* Conservation of Energy, p. 13.

^† Theory of Heat, p. 83.

page 46 the first direction and subsequent curvature of the ball's path, the changing speed, and the final fall, in presence of the earth. The "force" which we superadd in thought is not given in the phenomenon as perceived: and if we know the movements accomplished, prevented, modified, we know everything that is there.

One interpretation, indeed, may be given to these mysterious words, which makes them not superfluous, in a methodized account of the order of nature. "Gravitation" perhaps may mean only the rule of happening which, along with the deflection of the shot, describes also several other cases of movement; and if it enables us to advert to these while in presence of the immediate fact, it performs a truly scientific function. It is plain, however, that this is not what our Dynamic writers mean. A rule does not" change the motion of a body," does not "overcome obstacles and do work;" nor would any one dream of attaching such predicates to mere similarities of occurrence.

Our instructors then suppose themselves acquainted with more than phenomena, more than the laws of them; and believe that inductive analysis has carried them behind these to "the hiding-place of power." They tell us, with much ease and unanimity, what they have found there: so that the story is familiar to every advanced schoolboy, and reproduced in hundreds of examination papers every year. They have found, as sources of the phenomena, a considerable number of "Energies" of nature, which they distinguish from one another in various ways, as "strong" or "weak," as stretching far or keeping near, as demanding the unlike or content with anything, as single or splitting into opposites, as inorganic or organic. In every text-book of science a complete list of these is presented; and the student, as he learns how to discriminate them, cannot page 47 doubt that he is dealing, in each instance, with a separate unit of objective knowledge, which is the inner fountain of a definite set of outward changes. He thus is brought to conceive of nature as having many springs. Its multitudinousness is commanded by a senate of powers.

Further, it is impossible, on looking at the faces of these assembled forces, to assign the same rank to all, or miss the traits of graduated dignity which make them rather a hierarchy than a committee. The delicate precision with which chemical affinity picks its selecting way among the atoms, is an advance upon the indiscriminate grasp of gravitation at them all. The architecture of a crystal cannot vie with that of a tree. The sentiency of the mollusk is at an immeasurable distance from the thought which produces the Mécanique Céleste. Hence, in the company of powers that conduct the business of nature, a certain order of lower and higher establishes itself, which, without settling every point of precedency, at least marks a few steps of ascent, from the mechanical at the bottom to the mental at the top. All equally real, all equally old, they are differenced by the quality of the work they have to do.

On the imagination thus prepared, a new discovery is now flung. Keenly watch the face of any one of these forces; its features will change into those of another. You cannot fix its identity in permanence; it migrates from species to species. Now it is mechanical energy; in a minute it will be heat; if a tourmaline is near, it will turn up as electricity; and so on; for no part of the cycle is closed against it. You look, in short, upon a row of masks, behind which the "unknown power," slipping from one to another with magic agility, seems to multiply itself, but is found, on closer scrutiny, never to quit its unity. The senate of nature does but administer a monarchy.

And so, the plurality of forces disappears from the ultimate background, and comes to the front as a mere semblance. This brings up a new problem. What stands in the dynamic place thus vacated? How is it related to the disguises it assumes? Do they in any way represent it? or do they only hide it? To this question there are three answers given. (1.) The One Power is indifferently related to all its masks, but is like none of them; they are opaque and let no lineament shine through. (2.) The "phases" are not on an equal footing, but consecutive in their genesis, the lowest being the oldest. With that the One Power was at first identical, and that is what truly represents its essence. (3.) The "phases" are consecutive in their genesis, the highest being the oldest. With that the One Power is for ever identical; all else is its action, but not its image. The second of these is the materialist's answer. His preference for it is mainly determined by two reasons. In the first place, since the several forces, A, B, C, D, &c., are all interchangeable, it suffices to allow A (the mechanical), and all the rest are provided for. In the second place, the traces of actual evolution follow this order, conducting us back past the dawn of life, and even the combinations of chemistry, to a period of purely mechanical energy. In estimating these reasons I will step for a moment on to their own ground, and postpone all objection to the theory of "energies" on which they rest.

It is true that, among a number of interchangeables, if the first be given, the others are potentially there. But it is no less true that if the last be given, or any intermediate, there is provision for the rest. The possibility of reciprocal transmutation all round, determines no preference of any member as having priority over the rest, and cannot be page 49 pleaded as an excuse for selecting the rudest mask of nature as the most faithful likeness of its inner essence. The law of Conservation is impartial, and tells in both directions, exhibiting the elements of the world, here living up into the self-conscious, there dying down into the inorganic, and suggesting, rather than any initial point, circling currents of crossing change.

But further, there is not the slightest ground, in the present transmutations, for treating the lowest phase of force as adequate to the production of the highest. Though mechanical energy, now that it stands in presence of the several chemical elements, may pass into chemical form, it does not follow that it could do so in their absence; for this would be to predicate of homogeneous atoms what we know only of heterogeneous. And the same consideration applies to the phases higher in the scale. Given, the existing materials and conditions of life and mind, and the circulation and equivalence of forces may take place as alleged; but that the order could be inverted, and the equivalence avail to provide the conditions, cannot be inferred. Take, on the other hand, any higher "phase" as first, and it carries all below it. Chemical force presupposes mechanical (as cohesion), and acts at its expense; and vital presupposes and modifies the inorganic chemical. In this order of derivation, therefore, the original datum would yield what is required by divesting itself of certain conditions admitted to be there, while in the opposite order it would have to take on fresh conditions assumed to be absent at its start. If, in choosing from the phases of force the fittest representative form, we are to be guided by the possibility of deduction, the supreme term must surely be taken as First.

The second plea of the "materialist," viz. that the vista page 50 of evolution recedes into the simply mechanical, and is intersected at dimly seen stages by entering lights, first of chemical affinity, then of life, and finally of consciousness, it is the less necessary to qualify as a statement of fact, because it is destitute of logical cogency. Granted that at successive eras these new forces appeared upon the scene, this supplies the "when," hut not the "whence" of each. Something more is needful, if you would show that it is the product of its predecessor. Instead of advancing from behind, it may have entered from the side. You cannot prove a pedigree by offering a date. Since these several forces are but secondary phases of a Unitary Power, what obliges us to derive them one from another, instead of letting them all stand in equal and direct relation to their common essence? On this point the first answer to the inquiry after the One Power has a conclusive advantage over the second.

Such, it seems to me, would he the logical position of the materialist's case, on the assumption that separate kinds and transmutations of energy are known to us, over and above the resulting phenomena, as discoveries of natural science. That assumption, hitherto conceded, I must now withdraw. No "energy" has ever come under human notice, and disclosed its marks, so as to discriminate itself from others, similarly apprehended. This is not simply true thus far as a matter of fact: it is true permanently as a matter of necessity. We might watch for ever the relations of bodies and their parts inter se, and though we had eyes that ranged from the microscopic minimum to the analysis of the milky way, we should fetch no force into the field of view: and the whole story of what was laid open to us would be a record of interminable series and eddies of change. What are called the "transmutations of page 51 energy" are nothing hut transitions from one chapter of that record to another. A certain catena of phenomena runs to an end; the first link of a new one is ready to take its place: a body's fall is stopped; its temperature rises: the thermometer in the kettle ascends to 212° Fahrenheit and stays there; the water turns to steam: this is observed, and no more than this. And the list of metamorphosed energies deceives us, if we take it for anything beyond an enumeration of these junctures between class and class of consecutive movements. Did we bring to the contemplation of nature no faculties hut those which constitute our scientific outfit, I see no reason to believe that it would come before us under any other aspect; or that we should ever be tempted to paint its picture or tell its history in dynamic terms.

Are such terms then illusory? Are they susceptible of no meaning? or of only a false meaning? Far from it. The thought that is in them we cannot indeed fetch out of nature; but we are obliged to carry it into nature. To witness phenomena, and let them lie and dispose themselves in the mere order of time, space, and resemblance, is to us impossible. By the very make of our understanding we refer them to a Power which issues them: and no sooner is perception startled by their appearance than the intellect completes the act by wonder at their source. This "power," however, being a postulate intuitively applied to phenomena, and not an observed function found in them, does not vary as they vary, but mentally repeats itself as the needed prefix to every order of them: and though it may thus migrate, now into this group, now into that, it is the dwelling alone which changes, and that which is immanent is ever the same. You can vary nothing in the total fact, except the collocations of material conditions; page 52 out of which, as each new adjustment emerges, the persistent Power elicits a different result. Instead of first detecting many forces in nature and afterwards running them up into identity, the mind imports one into many collocations; never allowing it to take different names, except for a moment, in order to study its action, now here, now there. If this he true, if causality be not seen, but thought, if the thought it carries belongs to a rule of the under-standing itself, that every phenomenon is the expression of power, two consequences follow: the plurality of forces disappears: and, to find the true interpretation of the One which remains, we must look not without but within; not on the phenomena presented, but on the rational relations into which they are received. Power is that which we mean by it; nor have we any other way of determining its nature than by resort to our self-knowledge. The problem passes from the jurisdiction of natural science to that of intellectual philosophy. Thither let us follow it.

I have already hinted that if we were mere passive, though thinking, observers of the world around us, we should witness phenomena without asking for a power: the principle of causality would remain latent in the intellect: the occasion would be wanting which permits it to awake. That occasion is furnished by the active side of our nature, by our own spontaneous movement from its inner centre out upon objects near its circumference. Being conscious as originators of the exercise of power, we admit as recipients its exercise upon us: nor is causality conceivable except upon these meeting lines of action and reaction; any more than, in the case of position, a here is conceivable without a there. Both pairs, the dynamic and the geometrical, are functions of the same fundamental antithesis, of subject and object, which is involved in every page 53 cognitive act. Till we disengage ourselves from nature, we do not think, though we may feel: and when we disengage ourselves from nature, we are self-conscious subjects and objects of causal operation. The idea of power coming in this dual form, as out from us and on to us, its two sides are reciprocally related; and that which the inner side is to the object, the same is the outer side to the subject. With the inner side, however, we are intimately familiar: it is the one thing which we immediately know; unless, indeed, it sits so near our centre as rather to regulate our knowing than stand off enough to become itself the known: but in any case we have to mark it by a name, as the inmost nucleus of dynamic thought: we call it living Will. This is our causality; it is what we mean by causality: in the absence of this, no other source for the idea—in the presence of this, no other meaning for it, can be found. It is true, that of the reciprocal propositions, "We push against the wind," "The wind pushes against us," we know the force named in the first with a closeness not belonging to our knowledge of the other. We cannot identify ourselves with the wind as our own nisus is identified with us. We go out on an energy: we return home on a thought. But that thought is only the reflex of the energy; it has, and can have, no other type. Our whole idea of Power is identical with that of Will, or reduced from it. That which, in virtue of the principle of causality, we recognize as immanent in nature, is homogeneous with the agency of which we are conscious in ourselves. Dynamic conceptions have either this meaning, or no meaning: cancel this, and you cut them at the root, and they wither into words; and your knowledge, cast out into dry places, has to take refuge again with co-existences and successions. Whatever autho- page 54 rity attaches to the law of causality at all, attaches to it, presumably at least, in its intuitive form,—phenomena are the expression of living energy; and cannot be reduced within narrower limits, unless by express disproof of coincidence between its natural range and its real range. Till that disproof is furnished, the One Power stands as the Universal Will.

I am aware what courtesy it would require in a modern savant, whether of the Nescient or of the Omniscient school, to behave civilly to such folly as this must seem to him: nor can I pretend to find his laughter a pleasant sound: for I honour his pursuits, and sorrowfully dispense with his sympathy. It makes amends, however, that even among the most rigorous scientific thinkers, some curious testimony or other from time to time turns up to the correctness of the interpretation just given of the idea of power. Even Gassendi, the modern Epicurus, the eager disciple of Copernicus and Galileo, cannot refrain from resorting to living and conscious action in explanation of physical. To render the earth's attraction intelligible, he has two favourite devices. He lays it down that every whole nature has a sort of clinging affection for all its parts, and resists their being torn or kept away from it; so that the earth sends out invisible arms or tentacula to fetch hack objects detached from it: and hence the fall of the rain, the hail, the stone from the sling.^* And he institutes a double comparison;—first assimilating the earth to a magnet; and then the magnet's force to the fascinating or repulsive influence of objects upon the senses,—the sweetness of the rose, which draws us to it, the noisome-

^* De motu impresso a Motore translate, xii. Opera, Lugd. 1658, tom. iii. p. 491.

page 55 ness of a drain, that drives us away.^* In this appeal to "sympathy" and "antipathy" we see again, as already in the of Democritus, how inevitably the imagination, even when most intent on keeping within physical limits, is betrayed into mental analogies. Not a few, indeed, of the most clear-sighted men of science have been well aware of the real source of our dynamic conceptions; in some cases accepting it as authoritative, in others being ashamed of it as a mere occasion of superstition. Redtenbacher, in his "Principles of Mechanical Physics," refers our knowledge of "the existence of forces to the various effects which they produce, and especially to the feeling and consciousness of our own forces."^† And in conversation with Fechner, Professor E. H. Weber laid stress on the fact, that in the will to move the body occurs the only case of immediate consciousness of power operative on matter; and he accordingly identified the essence of power with that of will, and from this principle worked out his religious ideas. .^‡ That it is not, however, in the mere interest of a religious theory that this doctrine finds its strength, is evident from its hold on Schopenhauer, who, in virtue of it, would call the inward principle of nature nothing but will, though striking out from that name whatever makes its meaning divine. Herschel's judgment, often criticised but never shaken, was deliberately pronounced:—

"That it is our own immediate consciousness of effort when we exert force to put matter in motion, or to oppose and neutral-

^* Syntagma Philos. Phys. sect. iii. mem. I. lib. iii. p. ii. Op. 132; and De motu impresso, xiii. torn. iii. p. 492.

^† Das Dynamidensystem, Grundzüge einer mechanischen Physik, p. 12, ap. Lange; Gesch. d. Materialismus, ii. p. 205.

^‡ Fechner, Ueber die physikalische und philosophische Atornenlehre; 2te Aufl., p. 132 (note).

page 56 ize force, which gives us this internal conviction of power and causation so far as it refers to the material world, and compels us to believe that whenever we see material objects put in motion from a state of rest, or deflected from their rectilinear paths and changed in their velocities if already in motion, it is in consequence of such an effort somehow exerted, though not accompanied with our consciousness."^*

With the tone of this memorable statement it is interesting to compare the feeling of one who, owning the same psychological fact, treats it as an infirmity, instead of accepting it as a guide.

"Power, regarded as the cause of motion, is nothing," says Du Bois-Reymond, "but a more recondite product of the irresistible tendency to personify which is impressed upon us;—a rhetorical artifice, as it were, of our brain, snatching at a figurative turn of thought, because destitute of any conception clear enough for literal expression. In the notions of Power and Matter we find recurring the same dualism which presents itself in the ideas of God and the world, of soul and body; the same want which once impelled men to people bush and fountain, rock, air, and sea, with creatures of their imagination. What do we gain by saying it is reciprocal Attraction whereby two particles of matter approach each other? Not the shadow of any insight into the nature of the process. But, strangely enough, our inherent quest of causes is in a manner laid to rest by the involuntary image tracing itself before our inner eye, of a hand which gently draws the inert matter to it, or of invisible tentacles, with which the particles clasp together, try to seize each other, and at last twine together into a knot."^†

This outburst of exasperation against all dynamic conceptions,—for to that length it really goes,—is justified if the human mind has nothing to do but to become an accomplished Naturforscher. It is quite true that "insight into

^* Treatise on Astronomy, 1833; Ch. vii. § 370.

^† Untersuchungen über thierische Electricität; I. Bd. Berlin, 1848. Vorrede, S. xi. ap. Lange's Gesch. d. Materialismus, ii. 204.

page 57 the nature of a process" is gained only by a closer reading of its steps in their series and in their analogies, and is in no way aided by passing behind the movements they comprise. What then? Shall we be angry at our propensity to look behind them, and tear it from our nature under vows to reach a stainless intellect? We shall but emasculate the mind we wish to purify: for what is the nerve of its vigour but the very Wonder which is for ever seeking an unattainable rest? If we incessantly press into nature, it is in hope of finding what is beyond nature: and all that we have learned of the finite world indirectly comes from our affinity with the embracing Infinite. It would be strange if the Causal appetency, which no disappointment wears out, should be at once our greatest strength and our most fatal illusion. It is admitted to be "irresistible:" it is admitted to carry the belief of personality: but these features, which induced Herschel to yield to it and trust in it, are reasons with Du Bois-Reymond for resisting and despising it. I need hardly say that, when he calls its language "figurative" and its conception a "personification," he oracularly assumes the very point at issue. To "personify" is to invest with personality that which has it not: and to tell any one with Herschel's belief that he does this, is only to contradict him. So again, if you know that there are two things of different type, living power and dead power, and then transfer to the second the marks of the first, your language is "figurative:" but if to you the types are identical, the second coinciding with the first, you speak with literal exactitude; and to charge you with rhetoric is only to beg the question in dispute. Probably the writer was the less conscious of any dogmatism here, from his thoughts already running upon the stock example page 58 of belief in the Pagan gods of "rock and air and sea,"—fairly enough adducible as a departed superstition. But the dying-out of Polytheism is misconceived if it be regarded as an expulsion of every Conscious Presence from venerated haunts, and the substitution of a dead for a living world. It was a fusion, not an extinction, of Will: as the little cantons of nature, once under independent guardians, melted into ever wider provinces, and clans of men clustered into confederated nations, the detected harmony of the kosmos and the felt unity of humanity carried with them the enthronement of a single Divine Mind in place of the vanished local gods. It is not that other and other powers have been discovered, but that fewer and fewer have been needed, till the plurality is lost in One Supreme. And as, with the widening scope of the natural order, the many wills lapsed into one, so, among mono-theists, did the many motives of that One, once so freely attributed, more and more merge themselves in the recognition of an all-comprehending scheme, whose thoughts were not acts but laws, and whose purpose flowed into the inlets of individual life from an ocean of universal relations. By this surrender of providences in exiguis we drop the quest of design in events taken one by one, and learn to speak of the power which produces them, and to divide it into lots, not according to their supposed aims, but according to their visible kinds: and thus it is that by suspending the idea of an end in view, the full-bodied notion of Will is attenuated to that of Force. How imperfectly, even then, the life is driven out of it, may be seen from Du Bois-Reymond's expostulation with it. And the suspended idea only flits away to settle upon a higher point. Instead of having discovered that purpose is not page 59 there, we have simply learned that purpose takes in more; and the little pulses of separate volition are lost in the mighty movements of Eternal Thought.

In the remarkable passage which I have quoted, and in the argument of which it forms a part, Du Bois-Reymond puts Matter and Force on the same footing, and discharges the former as well as the latter from the realm of reality, by reducing it also to an empty abstraction. He is led to this position by that just logical appreciation which gives to his writings, as to those of Helmholtz, a high philosophical rank, in addition to their value as models of scientific exposition and research. The equipoise, true enough, is perfect, in respect to validity, between the ideas of Matter and of Power; and the only question is, whether both are to be dismissed as illusions, or both retained as intuitive data of thought, the conditions of all construed experience. To reject them both is practically impossible, though logically necessary if you part with either. To retain them both is simply to accept the fundamental relation of object and subject under its two constitutive functions, instead of treating our only modes of knowing as snares of ignorance. The existence of a Universal Will and the existence of Matter stand upon exactly the same basis—of certainty if you trust, of uncertainty if you distrust, the principia of your own reason. For my part, I cannot hesitate. Shall I be deterred by the reproach of "anthropomorphism"? If I am to see a ruling Power in the world, is it folly to prefer a man-like to a brute-like power, a seeing to a blind? The similitude to man means no more and goes no further than the supremacy of intellectual insight and moral ends over every inferior alternative: and how it can be contemptible and childish to derive everything from the highest known order of power rather than the lowest, and page 60 to converse with Nature as embodied Thought, instead of taking it as a dynamic engine, it is difficult to understand. Is it absurd to suppose mind transcending the human? or, if we do so, to make our own Reason the analogical base for intellect of wider sweep? How is it possible to look along any line of light traced by past research, and, estimating the contents which it reveals, and leaves still unrevealed, to remember that along all radii to which we may turn, a similar infinitude presents itself to any faculty that seeks it, and yet to conceive that this mass of truth to be known has only our weak intelligence to know it? And if two natures know the same thing, how can they he other than like? Nay, Du Bois-Reymond himself takes up the magnificent fancy of Laplace, of a "mind cognizant of all forces operating in nature at a given moment, and all mutual relations among the beings composing it. Such a mind, if in other respects capacious enough to subject these data to analysis, would comprise in the same formula the movements of the greatest masses in the universe, and of the lightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain to him; and to his glance future and past would alike be present. The human understanding presents, in the perfection to which it has brought astronomy, a feeble image of such a mind."^* Here is reproduced the very thought which, in his ignorance of differential equations, Plato expressed by saying that God was the supreme Geometer; simply taking to the summit-level the analogy which Laplace leaves floating at some indefinite height above the human. Is the conception, then, vitiated because it is "anthropomorphic"? Let Du Bois-Reymond answer: "Wir gleichen diesem Geist, denn wir begreifen ihn."^† If to have the

^* Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, p. 6.

^† Ibid. p. 10.

page 61 idea of a diviner nature is to resemble him, and if resemblance must be reciprocal, what can be more futile than the reproach that men attribute to God what is highest in humanity?

It may be doubted, indeed, whether the analogy might not be pressed further, without overstraining its truth. If the collective energies of the universe are identified with Divine Will, and the system is thus animate with an eternal consciousness as its moulding life, the conception we frame of its history will conform itself to our experience of intellectual volition. Its course is ever from the indeterminate to the determinate; and as the passage is made by rational preference among possibilities, thought has its intensity at the outset, and action in the sequel. It is in origination, in disposing of new conditions, in setting up order by differentiation, that the mind exercises its highest function. When the product has been obtained, and a definite method of procedure established, the strain upon us is relaxed, habit relieves the constant demand for creation, and at length the rules of a practised art almost execute themselves. As the intensely voluntary thus works itself off into the automatic, thought, liberated from this reclaimed and settled province, breaks into new regions, and ascends to ever higher problems: its supreme life being beyond the conquered and legislated realm, while a lower consciousness, if any at all, suffices for the maintenance of its ordered mechanism. Yet all the while it is one and the same mind that, under different modes of activity, thinks the fresh thoughts and carries on the old usages. Does anything forbid us to conceive similarly of the kosmical development; that it started from the freedom of indefinite possibilities and the ubiquity of universal consciousness; that, as intellectual exclusions narrowed the field, and page 62 traced the definite lines of admitted movement, the tension of purpose, less needed on these, left them as the habits of the universe, and operated rather for higher and ever higher ends not yet provided for; that the more mechanical, therefore, a natural law may he, the further is it from its source; and that the inorganic and unconscious portion of the world, instead of being the potentiality of the organic and conscious, is rather its residual precipitate, formed as the Indwelling Mind of all concentrates an intenser aim on the upper margin of the ordered whole, and especially on the inner life of natures that can resemble him? I am aware that this speculation inverts the order of the received kosmogonies. But, in advancing it, I only follow in the track of a veteran physiologist and philosopher, whose command of all the materials for judgment is beyond question,—the author of "Psychophysik." Fechner insists that protoplasm and zoophyte structure, instead of being the inchoate matter of organization, is the cast-off residuum of all previous differentiation, stopping short of the separation of animal from plant and of sex from sex, and no more capable of further development than is inorganic matter, without powers beyond its own, of producing organization^* And, far from admitting that the primordial periods had few organisms, which time increased in number, he contends that the earth was formerly more rich in organisms than now, and that the inorganic realm has grown at the expense of the organic.^†

The resolution of all power into Will is met by the thorough-going objection, that Mind is not energy at all, and can never stir a particle of matter. "Were it possible,"

^* Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs-und Entwickelungsgeschichte der Organismen, p. 73.

^† Ibid. pp. 77, 78.

page 63 says Lange, "for a single cerebral atom to be moved by 'thought' so much as the millionth of a millimetre out of the path due to it by the laws of mechanics, the whole 'formula of the universe' (i.e. as imagined by Laplace) would become inapplicable and senseless."^* "Suppose," he adds, "two worlds, both occupied by men and their doings, with the same course of history, with the same modes of expression by gesture, the same sounds of voice, for him who could hear them—i. e. not simply have their vibrations conveyed through the auditory nerve to the brain, but he self-conscious of them. The two worlds are therefore to be absolutely alike, with only this difference: that in the one the whole mechanism runs down like that of an automaton, without anything being felt or thought, whilst the other is just our world; then would the formula for these two worlds be completely the same. To the eye of exact research they would be indistinguishable."^†

So much the worse, are we not tempted to say, for "exact research"? If, with all its keenness and precision, it misses half the universe, and identifies diametrical opposites, it will be a calamity rather for it than for us, that its "formula" should prove less applicable than had been supposed. The extension to man, in an exaggerated form, of Descartes' doctrine of animal automatism marks, perhaps, the lowest point which the falling barometer of philosophy has reached. By him it was propounded for the express purpose of finishing off the mechanical modes of action, even when strained to their maximum, short of the human characteristics; and of opening in these a second and sharply contrasted world, containing another hemisphere of phenomena, with their own lines of causality and

^* Geschichte des Materialismus, ii. p. 155.

^† Ibid. ii. p. 156.

page 64 relations of affinity. Though by his absolute separation of matter and mind he cut the problem of the world in two, he at least embraced the whole of it, and attempted to solve it by a double formula. But his modern interpreters do not see why one half of his theory should not be stretched to do the work of the whole: they have only to ignore his unmechanical part of the world and leave it out in the cold, and in place of his contrast they will get an identity. For his maxims,—Movement is the cause of movement, Thought of thought, but neither of the other,—they substitute the rule, that Movement is the cause of both, but Thought of neither: so that there is no longer any counterpart to the mechanism of nature, or any work done beyond it; and whatever puffs of thought and screeches of feeling there may be, it is only that the engine is blowing off its steam: nothing comes of it, and it may be treated as waste. This theory is founded on the analysis of reflex action in the nervous apparatus, in which the sensory conductor having delivered its stimulus in the ganglion, the motory takes up the sequence and contracts the muscles requisite for action in response. If the brain be kept from interfering, the circuit is completed in unconsciousness; and its series, though determining the subject to all sorts of clever and congruous movements, is composed of molecular changes unattended by feeling or design. When the scene is transferred to the brain or connected with it, the story, we are assured, is still the same, only with the added phenomenon of consciousness. In the one case, the subject acts: in the other, he acts and knows it. But this new fact is inoperative, and leads to nothing: were it absent, he would figure away as a molecular automaton all the same, and not a scene or a word would be altered in the five-act comedy of life. Comparing in this page 65 view the reflex and the cerebral activities, we might say that the former resembles a clock with one beat—viz., movement only; the latter, a clock with two beats—viz., movement plus consciousness.

By the extent of this increment, the second does more work than the first. What, then, becomes of the difference? Where are we to look for it at its next stage? We are expressly told it has no next stage, and things will go on exactly as if it had not been there. Then a portion of work has perished, and the Conservation of energy is contradicted.

The only escape from this conclusion would be by denying that consciousness produced is "work done." This, however, is to admit that it is not an effect of molecular forces; to exempt it altogether from the range of physical law; and to throw it into an independent world of its own, beyond the jurisdiction of the natural philosopher. Such a position would be an unconditional relapse into the two-armed embrace of Descartes, from which the whole doctrine is a struggle to escape.

It is said that if thought can move a single molecule, the law of causality is at an end. Why is it not equally at an end if, conversely, molecular movement can wake a single thought? Either way, causality alike steps out of the material series, and crosses over to the other, now last, now first. And only on the assumption that, being a monopoly of Physics, it cannot do this, has the objection any sense.

This doctrine, that the most important elements of life,—all that constitute experience, and embody themselves in language, art, religion,—are so much surplusage,—that the mental phenomena are collectively a cul-de-sac, leading no-whither,—comes with a singular irony from men who by page 66 force of intellect, knowledge, and character, are in many ways changing the conceptions of their time, and whose most signal triumph it will be to convince us that, if they never felt or thought at all, or stirred emotion and idea in us, it would make no difference to our history, and the senseless pantomime of our life would fit into the same niche in the world's "formula." Such paradoxical triumphs are occasionally won by planting the old nightmare of necessity closely on our breast. But not for long: and the first of us that, feeling cold, spreads his hands before the fire, or, struck with grief, wrings them over the lifeless features of a friend, will here break the spell, and restore the faith that to be conscious, to think, to love, is to have power.

But then, it is said, this mental power, even if we concede it, is found only in connection with definite material conditions; in the absence of which, as in the structure of plants, we have no grounds for admitting any conscious life.

"What can you say then to the student of nature if, before he allows a Psychical principle to the universe, he asks to be shown, somewhere within it, embedded in neurine and fed with warm arterial blood under proper pressure, a convolution of ganglionic globules and nerve-tubes proportioned in size to the faculties of such a Mind?"^*

"What can we say?" I say, first of all, that this demand for a Divine brain and nerves and arteries comes strangely from those who reproach the Theist with "anthropomorphism." In order to believe in God, they must be assured that the plates in "Quain's Anatomy" truly represent him. If it be a disgrace to religion to take the human as measure of the Divine, what place in the scale

^* Du Bois-Reymond, Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, p. 37.

page 67 of honour can we assign to this stipulation? Next, I ask my questioner, whether he suspends belief in his friends' mental powers till he has made sure of the contents of their crania? and whether, in the case of ages beyond reach, there are no other adequate vestiges of intellectual and moral life in which he places a ready trust? Immediate knowledge of mind other than his own he can never have: its existence in other cases is gathered from the signs of its activity, whether in personal lineaments or in products stamped with thought: and to stop this process of inference with the discovery of human beings, is altogether arbitrary, till it is shown that the grounds for extending it are inadequate. Further, I would submit that, in dealing with the problem of the Universal Mind, this demand for organic centralization is strangely inappropriate. It is when mental power has to be localized, bounded, lent out to individual natures and assigned to a scene of definite relations, that a focus must be found for it and a molecular structure with determinate periphery be built for its lodgment. And were Du Bois-Reymond himself ever to alight on the portentous cerebrum which he imagines, I greatly doubt whether he would fulfil his promise and turn Theist at the sight: that he had found the Cause of causes would be the last inference it would occur to him to draw: rather would he look round for some monstrous creature, some kosmic megatherium, born to float and pasture on the fields of space. The great "energies" which we recognize as modes of the Universal Power are not central but ubiquitous: gravitation reports itself wherever there is a particle of matter; heat and light spread with the ether whose undulations they are; and electricity, at one moment gathered into poles, at another sweeps in the aurora over half the heavens. But if still page 68 my questioner cannot dispense with some visible structure as the organ of the Ever-living Mind, I will ask him, in his conception of the brain, to take into account these words of Cauchy's:—

"Ampere has shown . . . that the molecules of different bodies may be regarded as composed each of several atoms, the dimensions of which are infinitely small relatively to their separating distances. If then we could see the constituent molecules of the different bodies brought under our notice, they would present to our view sorts of constellations; and in passing from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, we should find, in the ultimate particles of matter, as in the immensity of the heavens, central points of action distributed in presence of each other."^*

If then the invisible molecular structure and movement do but repeat in little those of the heavens, what hinders us from inverting the analogy, and saying that the ordered heavens repeat the rhythm of the cerebral particles? You need an embodied mind? Lift up your eyes, and look upon the arch of night as the brow of the Eternal, its constellations as the molecules of the universal consciousness, its space as their possibility of change, and the ethereal waves as the afferents and efferents of Omniscient Thought. Even in the human nerves, the solid lines are but conductors, and the granules but media of movement; and science is ever on the search for some subtler essence that is thus sheathed and transmitted. In the kosmos, then, think of that essence as unsheathed and omnipresent, with light for its messenger and space for its scope of perception, and your material requisition is not wholly a dream.

Quite in the sense of Du Bois-Reyinond's objection was the saying of Laplace, that in scanning the whole heaven with the telescope he found no God; which again has its

^* Cited from Moigno's Cosmos, torn. ii. p. 374, by Fechner: Atom-enlehre, xxvi. p. 232.

page 69 parallel in Lawrence's remark that the scalpel, in opening the brain, came upon no soul.^* Both are unquestionably true, and it is precisely the truth of the second which vitiates the intended inference from the first. Had the scalpel alighted on some perceptible , we might have required of the telescope to do the same; and, on its bringing in a dumb report, have concluded that there was only mechanism there. But, in spite of the knife's failure, we positively know that conscious thought and will were present, yet no more visible, yesterday: and so, that the telescope misses all but the bodies of the universe and their light, avails nothing to prove the absence of a Living Mind through all. If you take the wrong instruments, such quæsita may well evade you. The test-tube will not detect an insincerity, or the microscope analyze a grief. The organism of nature, like that of the brain, lies open, in its external features, to the scrutiny of science: but, on the inner side, the life of both is reserved for other modes of apprehension, of which the base is self-consciousness and the crown is religion.

The contempt or sorrow with which the claim of design is struck out from the interpretation of the world, results in like manner from a false start in construing the dynamic idea. We are supposed to have made acquaintance, in the laboratory, the botanic garden, the aquarium, and among the stars, with a set of blind forces, to which a happy hit and a stupid blunder are indifferent and possible, alike; and then, by way of supplement to these, to introduce into the thus prepared scene the action of intellectual purpose. The former is treated as the sphere of determinate caus-

^* Both these dicta I quote from memory, without at the moment being able to verify the citations. An equivalent passage to the latter occurs in the "Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man," p. 8, 1819.

page 70 ality; the latter, of teleological government. It is plain that, under these conditions, nothing is left to the second agency except the residue unexplained by the first; nor does anything suit its character except the fitnesses which (inter alia) are not impossible to the other also. Unless, therefore, it invades and interrupts the series otherwise inevitable, it is liable to be deposed and "mediatized" by advancing knowledge; its troop of anomalies filing off by degrees into the drilled army of necessity; and the adaptations it had claimed being traced to the forces which cannot think. With these logical preconceptions, it is no wonder that the naturalist directs a professional enmity against the doctrine of design, and meets it as the opponent he is for ever beating back: and as he is certainly not only in his right, but at his duty, in pushing to the utmost his researches into the physical history of the forms and phenomena he studies, it is a venial impatience with which he resents attempts to stop him by "supernatural phantoms" across his path. If he can display the mechanism by which the heliotrope turns to the sun, or the chemistry by which in a few hours the turbot assumes the colour of the ground over which it swims, or tell the whole story which, beginning with a jelly-point tingling in the sunshine, ends with the completed human eye, let his work have all sympathy and honour. But if he imagines that he is displacing Thought from nature by discovering causality, he is the subject of the very same illusion which would cry him down and arrest his course. The cases do but present the two sides of one superstition.

The dispute between acting Force and intending Mind is as unmeaning as the quarrel of a man with his own image. The two are identical,—expressions, now in all dimensions, now in some, of the same nature. Causal power other than Will being an unknown quantity, nay, page 71 absolutely out of the sphere of thought, teleology and causality are incorporated in one; and mechanical necessity, instead of being the negation of purpose, is its persistence,—the declining, no doubt, of this or that possible diversion to minor ends, but in subservience to the stability of a more comprehensive order. The inexorability of nature is but the faithfulness of God, the maintenance of those unswerving habits in the universe, without which it could train no mind and school no character: and that it is hard and unbending to us does not prevent its being fluid to Him. To affirm purpose, therefore, in the adjustments of the world, is not to set up a rival principle outside their producing force, hut to plant, or rather to leave, an integrating thought within it. And, conversely, to trace those adjustments to their "physical causes," is not to withdraw them from their ideal origin, but only to detect the method of carrying the inner meaning to its realization. "Who will venture to say, what nevertheless is constantly imagined, that to find how a change comes about is to prove that it was never contemplated? If it were contemplated, it would have to be executed somehow; if, the moment you read the machinery provided for this purpose, the purpose itself is quenched from your view, is this the discovery or the loss of a reality?

This treatment of determinate causation as incompatible with conscious aims is the more curious, as proceeding from a school which, as necessarian, is constantly labouring to show the co-existence of the two in human nature. If man is only a sample of the universal determinism, yet forms purposes, contrives for their accomplishment, and executes them, definite causality and prospective thought can work together, and the field which is occupied by the one is not pre-occupied against the other.

The frequent plea, "See, there is no mind here, for all is page 72 necessary causation," tacitly concedes that, in order to have mind, there must he exemption from necessity; and can be consistently urged only by one who attributes this exemption to the human will. Is the argument conclusive from his point of view? It would be so, were it possible to prove his premiss, viz., the universality in the kosmos of necessary causation. But this is plainly out of the question, because his amplest science carries the induction, such as it is, only skin-deep into the universe; because he would have to show that the present fixity was not determined by a past exercise of will; because Mind, in proportion as it is orderly and exact in its methods, may assume the semblance of necessity, and be the less suspected that its freedom works by rule. He knows how he himself, though conscious of self-disposal as well as of subjection to nature, presents to the determinist the aspect of a machine; and how can he be secure against a similar illusion in his interpretation of the world? What is to prevent the same combination of free and necessary causality which he finds in himself from existing also beyond? Nay, if there were only mind-excluding force in nature, how could there arise a force-resisting mind in him? He could not carry in himself new causal beginnings, if in the kosmos whence he comes the lines of possibility were definitely closed.

I revert, then, after weighing these objections, to my "unwiderstehlicher Hang zur Personification," and persist in regarding that which the natural philosopher calls force, and Professor Tyndall raises to an immanent life, as Causal Will, manifesting itself, not in interference with an established order, but in producing it. As it builds and weaves and quickens all matter, and could not otherwise work before us at all, the structures and growths of the material world are its seat, and their phenomena its witnesses: so that the very story,—of saline crystals, and ice-stars, and page 73 Fern-fronds, and human birth,—which Professor Tyndall tells in order to exclude it, is to me a continuous report of its agency and laws. He asks, what else is there here than matter? I answer, the movements of matter, with their disposing and "formative power," the attracting and repelling energies, which, dealing with molecules and cells, are not molecules and cells. "Mens agitat molem." Whoever finds this incredible, will soon have to make friends with some abstraction which is but a ghastly mimicry of it; for some conception over and above that of "pure matter," is indispensable to the accurate representation of the simplest facts. If in the typical "oak-tree" the vitality suddenly ceased, the "matter" of it would at the next moment still be there, as certainly as that of a clock which had run down: it would weigh the same as before, and so stand the admitted test of the indestructibility of matter. Yet something is gone which was previously there, and that something has to be described otherwise than in terms of "matter." The droll "hypothesis" which my critic amuses himself with conjecturally attributing to me, "of a vegetative soul," wedded to the tree at a definite date, and quitting it when its term was up, certainly does not help us; and is set up on my behalf, I presume, simply from the facility of knocking it down. But are we any better served by the "alternative" conception of a "formative power," long latent and "potential," i.e. not forming anything, but only going to do so? I see that the conception contradicts Büchner's dictum, "A power not expressing itself has no existence;" yet am at a loss to know how, during its latency, its presence is ascertained, and to exercise with regard to it "that Vorstellungs-fähigkeit with which, in my efforts to think clearly, I can never dispense." Whilst it lies in wait behind the scenes,—before the time for the deposit of the crystal or the germination of the acorn,— page 74 where is it? behind what molecules does it hide? through what space is it invisibly present? What shape has it, enabling it to lay its building particles and to agglutinate cells? How does it know the right moment of temperature for stepping on to the stage, and declaring itself without further reserve? In short, all the questions addressed to me respecting the "formative soul" invented for me, I refer back to be answered on behalf of my critic's "potential power." "Potentiality" is an intelligible fact in a being consciously able to act or to refrain. But when the idea is carried into a system of necessitated phenomena, it means nothing in them, but something in us, as their observers—viz., that we conditionally anticipate a future change, foreseeing a distant term of a series which would be certain, provided the nearer ones were not obscure. To plant this subjective suspense out into the field of nature to do objective work there, now alighting visibly upon the earth, and then hidden again in "an ambrosial cloud," is a sort of intellectual illusion which modern logic might have been expected to cast out.

In truth, the nearer I approach the Power which Professor Tyndall pursues through nature with so subtle and brilliant a chase, and the more I try, by combining the predicates which he gives and withholds, to think it out into the clear, the less distinct does this "ideal somewhat" become, not simply to the imagination, but to intellectual apprehension. A power which is not Mind, yet may be "potential" and exist when and where it makes no sign; which is "immanent" in matter, yet is matter; which "is manifested in the universe," yet is not "a Cause," therefore has no effects; presents to me, I must confess, not an overshadowing mystery, but an assemblage of contradictions. I have always supposed that "Power" was a relative word, and that the correlative was found in the "work done:" page 75 take away the latter by denying the causation, and the term drops into five letters which might as well he arranged in any other order.

Bidding God-speed to this sudden flank-attack upon usurping hierarchies and dogmas, I pursue only the main line of inarch in the free "idea." Whither does it lead me? It shows me the three provinces which make up our kosmos blended into one organism by an all-pervading life, which conducts all their processes, from the flow of the river to the dynamics of the human brain. This alone brings me to a pause of solemn wonder,—a single power through the whole, and that a living one! But there is more behind. This power, co-extensive though it is with nature, is not all: beyond her level we are to think of a "higher life," to which her laws and history do but give functional expression. May we then really think out this "idea" of a life "higher" than what is supreme in the world,—higher, therefore, than the human? But scale of height above that point we do not possess, except in gradation of intel-

^* Fortnightly Review, November, 1875, p. 596.

page 76 lectual and moral sublimity; and either that Ideal Life must cease to live, or must come before our thought as transcendent Mind and Will, on a scale comprehending as well as permeating the universe. With any guide who brings me hither I sit down with joy and rest. It is the mountain-top, which shows all things in larger relations and through a more lustrous air; and every feature,—the great build of the world close at hand; the thinning of the everlasting snows, as they stoop and melt towards human life; the opening of sweet valleys below the earlier and wilder pines; and the final plains, teeming in their silence with industry and thought,—is better understood than from level points of view, where the scope is narrowed or the calm is lost. But my guide seems less content than I to rest here, and deserts me, not, so far as I can trace him, to reach a brighter point, but rather to descend into the mists. To the "higher life," transcending our highest, he dares not give the predicate "Mind," or apply the pronoun of Personality.^* On what scale, then, is it "higher"? If not on the intellectual and moral, then there is that in man which rises above it; for the power of attaining truth and goodness is ideally supreme. If Professor Tyndall can reveal to us something which is higher than Mind and Free Causality, by all means let us accept it at his hands and assign it to God. But in order to profess this, and therefore to deprecate as an "anthropomorphism," the ascription of mind to Him, one would have, I think, to be one's self something more than man. Only such a one could cast a look above the level of Reason, to see whether it was overtopped: and so, this fashionable reproach against religion is virtually an arrogating of a superhuman position. As we cannot overfly our own zone, no beat of our wings availing to lift us out of the atmosphere they press, surely,

^* Fortnightly Review, November, 1875, p. 596.

page 77 if that "higher life" speaks to us in idea at all, it can only he as Perfect Reason and Righteous Will. Those who find this type of conception not good enough for them,—do they succeed in struggling upwards to a better? Rather, I should fear, does a persistent gravitation gain upon them, till they droop and sink into the alternative faith of blind force which leaves their own rank supreme.

Professor Tyndall sets the belief in "unbroken causal connection" and the "theologic conception" over against each other as "rivals;" and says that an hour's reasoning will give the first the victory^* The victory is impossible, because the rivalry is unreal. Why should not a Mind of illimitable resources,—such as "the theologic conception" enthrones in the universe,—conduct and maintain "unbroken causal connection"? Is not such connection congenial with the relations of thought and the harmony of intellectual life? Do not you, the student of nature, yourself admire it? Is it not the theme of your constant praise? Do you not speak with contemptuous aversion of alleged deviations from the steadfast tracks of order? and would you not yourself maintain those tracks, if you were at the head of things? To this attitude you are impelled by a just jealousy for the coherent beauty and worth of science as a whole. If, then, these unswerving lines so dignify the investigating intellect which regressively traces them up, how can it be out of character with the Mind of minds to think them progressively forth?

In the discussion which here reaches its close, my object has been simply defensive,—to repel the pretension of speculative materialism to supersede "the theological conception," by tracing that pretension to an imperfect appreciation of the ultimate logic of science. But the idea of Divine Causality which is thus saved, though an essential

^* Fortnightly Review, November, 1S75, p. 596.

page 78 condition, is not the chief strength of religion; giving perhaps its measure in breadth, but not in depth. Were the physical aspects of the world alone open to us, we should doubtless gain, by reading a divineness between the lines, for beauty a new meaning, for poetry a fuller music, for art a greater elevation; but hardly a better balance of the affections or more fidelity of will. It is not till we cross the chasm which stops the scientific continuity, not till we make a new beginning on the farther side, that the "idea of a higher life," emerging now in a far different field, can claim its "ethical value." The self-conscious hemisphere of inner experience,—which natural philosophy leaves in the dark,—this it is which turns to its Divine Source; and finds, not in any vacant "mystery," but in the living sympathy of a supreme Perfection, "the lifting power of an ideal element in human life." Only by converse with our own minds can we—to use the words of Smith of Cambridge—"steal from them their secrets," and "climb up to the contemplation of the Deity."^* It is but too natural that this inner side of knowledge, this melior pars nostri, should be unheeded by those who look on it as the mere accessory fringe of an automatic life, gracefully hanging from the texture, but without a thread of connection beyond; and that with them the word "subjective" should be tantamount to "groundless." They confess the "mystery" of this interior experience only to fly from it and refuse its light. Yet here it is that at last light and vision lapse into One, and supply the ^† for the apprehension of the first truths of physical and the last of hyper-physical knowledge. Till we accept the "faiths" which our faculties postulate, we can never know

^* Discourse iii. p. 66, ap. Tulloch's Rational Theology, vol. ii. p. 158.

^† Plato de Rep. 508, A.

page 79 even the sensible world; and when we accept them, we shall know much more. Short of this firm trust in the bases whereon our nature is appointed to stand,—a trust which, if destroyed by a half-philosophy, must be restored by a whole one,—the grandest "ideas" flung out to play with and turn about in the kaleidoscope of possibilities, or work up as material of poetry and rhetoric, can no more "lift" a human will than the gossamer pluck up the oak on which it swings. Unless your "ideal" reveals the real, it has no power, and its "ethic value" is that of a dissolving image or a passing sigh. You must "believe," ere you can "remove mountains;" if you only fancy, they sit as a nightmare on your breast. And if man does nothing well, till he ceases to have his vision, and his vision rather has him and wields him for action or repose; and if then he astonishes you with his triumphs over "nature" and her apparent real, is he the only being who thus rides out upon a thought, and makes the elements embody it? Have not these elements already learned their obedience, and grown familiar with the intellectual mandate to which they yield? A man truly possessed, ethically moulded by the pressures of reverence and love, you can never persuade that the beauty, the truth, the goodness which kindles him is but his private altar-lamp: it is an eternal, illimitable light, pervading and consecrating the universe. Unless it be so, it fires him no more: and, instead of utterly surrendering his will to it in trust and sacrifice, he begins to admire it as a little mimic star of his own,—a phosphorescence of matter set up by the chemistry of nature, not to see things by, but to glisten on the darkness of himself. It is vain to expatiate on the need of religion for our nature, and on the elevation of character which it can produce, and in the same breath bid it begone from the home of truth and seek

shelter in the tent of romance. If its power is noble, its essence is true. And what that essence comprises has been worked fairly out in the long experiment of Christianity on human nature; which has shown that, in its purest and strongest phase, religion is a variety and last sublimity of personal affection and living communion with an Infinitely Wise and Good and Holy. The expectation that anything will remain if this be dropped, and that by flinging the same sacred vestments of speech round the form of some empty abstraction you can save the continuity of piety, is an illusion which could never occur except to the outside observer. Look at the sacred poetry and recorded devotion of Christendom: how many lines of it would have any meaning left, if the conditions of conscious relationship and immediate converse between the human and the Divine Mind were withdrawn? And wherever the sense of these conditions has been enfeebled, through superficial "rationalism" or ethical self-confidence, "religious sterility" has followed. To its inner essence, thus tested by positive and negative experience, Religion will remain constant, taking little notice of either scientific forbearance or critical management; and, though left, perhaps, by temporary desertions to nourish its life in comparative silence and retirement, certain to be heard, when it emerges, still speaking in the same simple tones, and breathing the old affections of personal love, and trust, and aspiration.