isation for lower, is the general rule of nature. Whether this is so or not, there are at least in nature a multitude of facts bearing that character, and this is sufficient for the argument."-(P. 152.) One asks with astonishment, Is it really meant to be said that vegetables and animals are wholly caused by soil and manure? Have the sun and parent vegetables and animals, and many other adjacent and antecedent agencies, contributed nothing to their perfections? No sane person has ever fancied that there may not be more in an effect than in any of its partial causes. The question is, Can there be more in an effect than in its complete cause, whether that be a single cause or the sum of a multitude of partial causes? Reason affirms it to be self-evident that there cannot, and not a fact or analogy in nature is at variance with. the affirmation. The latest and most elaborate result of development can have no perfection which it has not derived from some of the agents which have concurred in its formation. But whatsoever is first of all things must be the whole cause of all things. Secondary causes cannot add to what it contributes, since they only impart of what they have themselves received from it. Therefore it must necessarily contain in itself all the perfections that can ever after exist. To deny this is wholly to set aside the law of causality. It is not what Physicus calls it, a "childishly easy refuta

tion" of Locke's argument, but it is childish in every respect.

The materialist believes that he takes up a specially respectful attitude towards science, and defers more to its teaching than does the theist. But this, again, is what cannot be granted. The materialist goes to science with a theory which he ought to be content to derive from it, and which must make it impossible for him to study such departments of knowledge as psychology, ethics, and history-not to speak of theology-in an unprejudiced and liberal manner. He cannot but be as incapable of impartiality in estimating the teachings of the mental sciences as the idealist in judging of the doctrines of the physical sciences. The theist, in reality, occupies a far more advantageous position. He can be both just and deferential alike towards the physical and mental sciences; he is committed to no one mode of explaining phenomena; he is bound to accept the facts and laws of all science just as science gives them; and when science shows him that God has operated in nature, mind, or history, otherwise than he imagined, he can, without having any reason to be ashamed, because in perfect consistency with his principles, modify his theology in accordance with the new information which he has received. If force be not explicable by matterthe living by the dead-species by evolution

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mental phenomena by physical properties,—materialism must be erroneous. Were all these positions proved, theism would not be disproved.

The view which is expressly maintained by some, and tacitly assumed by many materialists -the view that only explanations which can be subjected to the verification of the senses, or represented in imagination as processes which the senses might trace if their powers were sufficiently magnified, are truly scientific-is also untenable. Genuine explanation requires, of course, definite thought, and is generally attained in regard to physical things only with the discovery of exact quantitative relations; but thought, which merely recalls or represents sense, is seldom definite, and even in physical investigation the path of progress is from sense towards pure thought. Scientific comprehension is only attained when intelligence has got beyond figurate or pictorial conception, and has freed itself from the material and sensuous elements contained in immediate perception. Scarcely any cause has had a more perverting influence on the study of mental and moral facts than the bias which the mind derives from its familiar converse with the objects of sense to assimilate all other objects to these, and to think of them under material categories, or according to material analogies. The philosopher and the theologian require to be constantly on their guard against being deluded

by the subtle operation of the same cause, seeing that a multitude of religious and speculative beliefs which reason must reject flow from this source. Materialism undoubtedly owes much of its success to habitually addressing the mind in figurate language and through sensuous imagery. Instead of convincing the understanding by strictly relevant reasons, it meets at one and the same time its craving for satisfaction, and its aversion to exertion by hypotheses agreeable to the imagination, because capable of being easily represented in a pictorial or sensuous form. But in the eyes of thoughtful men, this, the great secret of its power, is an evidence of its scientific worthlessness. Materialism must ever be plausible to the popular understanding, but simply, so its opponents think, because it is content to stop short at the plausible and popular.

III.

Thus far I have only dealt with the generalities of materialism. It is now necessary to come to particulars.

The materialist supposes that there is a matter which precedes every form of mind, and exists. independently of all thought. But can he prove this? It requires to be proved, because it seems to many untrue, and even contradictory. Mere

matter-matter in itself-matter as an exclusively objective fact, or as wholly independent of intelligence, is, they hold, unknown and unknowable matter. It is no more possible, so they tell us, to think of such matter than to think of a centreless circle, or a stick with merely one end. The only matter which by any stretch of mind can be conceived or imagined as even a possible object of knowledge, thus runs the averment,-is matter which is not alone, but accompanied by mind; matter which is relative to and dependent on mind. But if this be true, on what ground can the materialist maintain that there is any such thing as the matter of which he talks? If that which he represents as the sum and substance and explanation of all existences is an absolute contradiction in thought, what authority has he for attributing to it real being and wonderful powers? If matter is never known and cannot be known to have an independent existence, how does he reach the conclusion that it has an independent existence?

This argument, familiar to the students of Professor Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic,' completely blocks the path of the materialist, so that he must remove it before he can proceed. Now I pronounce no opinion on the absolute validity of the argument. It signifies not for my present purpose whether it proves merely the truism that