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desire, or will. This objection to materialism was admirably put by Professor Tyndall-in words which he has not yet retracted, and which he will find it hard to refute, should he wish to do sowhen he wrote: "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one phenomena to the other. They appear together, but we do not know why. Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their grouping, all their electrical discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling,— we should probably be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness? The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable." Materialism presents itself as an intelligible theory of the universe, and yet it has not succeeded in explaining a single fact in the world of consciousIt hopes to be able some day to show us

ness.

future Shakespeares "potential in the fires of the sun," but as yet it cannot find the sensations of a protamaba even in its own protoplasm.1

There are two other objections to materialism which are as strong as any that have been urged, but which I must be content merely to indicate.

First, then, materialism is inconsistent with the testimony of our moral consciousness, with the facts of our moral nature. We perceive a distinction between right and wrong; we feel that we are free to choose between them; that we are responsible, however, for our choice; that we are praiseworthy or blameworthy, &c. These perceptions and feelings are facts as certain as any in the world, and the theory which cannot honestly accept them ought to be rejected. But materialism cannot. It must deny them, or explain them away, or invent untenable hypotheses as to their origin. Secondly, materialism refuses satisfaction to the spiritual wants, aspirations, and convictions of men. It denies the existence of God and of the soul. It acknowledges nothing that is higher than the seen, or better than the temporal. It resolves religion in all its length and breadth into a delusion. It openly threatens to turn it out of the world. But, as we have seen, reason and morality are to be turned out also. Only when reason, morality, and religion have all been got

1 See Appendix XVIII.

rid of, will materialism have the world to itself. And then the world will not be worth having.1

Let me conclude by entirely dissenting from words of Professor Huxley, which I have already quoted in this lecture. His assertion that "it is utterly impossible to prove that anything whatever may not be the effect of a material and necessary cause," is an arbitrary and unphilosophical dogma which need not, however, disquiet us, since up to the present hour no single fact of order, life, mind, morality, or religion, has been proved to be the effect of a material cause. His assertion that human logic is incompetent to show that any act is really spontaneous has no other ground than his strange misconception of what is meant by a spontaneous act,-than the fancy that "a really spontaneous act is one which, by the assumption, has no cause." His assertion that "any one who is acquainted with the history of science will admit that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now more than ever means, the extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity," only proves that he is more a follower of Comte than he is himself aware of, and has incautiously adopted one of that author's most superficial and erroneous generalisations. His prophecy as to the future would have been differ1 See Appendix XIX.

ent if he had studied the past more thoroughly and independently, although, perhaps, the wisest course would have been not to prophesy at all. He has erred in thinking that it is the progress of materialism which alarms its opponents; it is its spread a very different thing-which'alarms them; its rapid diffusion when it is making no real progress; the humiliating fact that so many not uneducated persons are thoughtless enough to believe its proud and empty promises, although there are no achievements to justify them. He tells us that "many of the best minds of these days watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger as a savage feels when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun." I thought that during an eclipse it was over the face of the earth that the great shadow crept; but that is of no consequence. This is, that, although where the shadow of materialism creeps there may be many to believe that there is no sun, the sun is by no means affected either by the shadow or by the foolish unbelief which accompanies it, but remains where and what it was, and when the shadow is past will be seen to be bright, beneficent, mighty, and terrible as ever. They who believe so cannot crouch and tremble before a shadow, whatever those may do who believe that the shadow is more than a shadow,-that it is greater than the sun,— that it will be eternal.

LECTURE V.

POSITIVISM.

I.

POSITIVISM is to be the subject of the present lecture. It is a doctrine which is closely related both in history and character to scepticism on the one hand, and to materialism on the other. It owes its existence to the partly concurrent and partly counteractive operation of these two theories. It is a link between them; a cross or hybrid in which their respective qualities are combined, although incapable of being truly harmonised.

The term positivism has been objected to both on philological and logical grounds, but any faults it may have are not of a seriously dangerous kind, and it is my wish to avoid all controversies merely or mainly verbal. It was not, perhaps, a term greatly needed, and it may not be the best which could have been devised; but now that it has

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